Chapter Text
What do you do when you aren’t sure why you are living, when you cannot make shows to your heart's content because of other people’s views that your work is dangerous?
Kamishiro Rui didn’t know.
She wanted to stay alive. Why did she want to?
The pit pattering of the rain on her umbrella is something pleasant in her mundane life. Simple things made her feel something, if she gets wet she’ll feel worse.
Even as she walks home from school, a place she despises. She didn’t mean being excluded and ostracized; it was more about other things.
Rui doesn’t like the world she lives in, or rather, she grew to dislike the world she lives in.
Once she was younger, filled with hope and wonder that could be explored in shows, now she wondered how much of the distasteful things were filtered out because she didn’t understand.
Her mind can wander off as she walks home, the movements basically second nature since she’s stopped making any pitstops on the way home. She used to back when she still had motivation for her guerrilla gigs, she wondered when she lost it.
The streets that she once looked at eagerly to see what kind of stage she could set up for some reason seemed hollower than usual. Did she prefer this kind of atmosphere?
If Rui had to think about how she shows her dislike…
She thinks this is best reflected in her eyes since people say a person’s eyes are a window to their soul. What once was a shining gold filled with life turned into something forever dead, a dull glimmer to them. Her classmates say she looks creepy because of them but Rui would dryly say it adds to her charm.
Enough about that, she’s reached her front door.
“I am home” she says, not even bothering to take off her shoes. No one is here; her parents had both said they’d be working for another week in a different town, Rui’s mom saying how sorry she was that she could only drop by the house today when Rui was at school. At least they text her so she isn’t left in the dark, but is there a difference from talking with someone face to face as compared to talking to someone over the screen?
She sighs, it didn’t matter what she wanted or didn’t want, she knew the consequences when she gave in to what she wanted, the itchy newish scars on her upper arms are more than enough of a reminder.
“Ah, I need to disinfect them… I can’t let them leak blood onto my uniform again” she thinks as she walks among the empty halls, expecting to just retreat to her room and throw herself into a new project again “I just need to stand under the water”.
So imagine her surprise when she sees an old laptop on the kitchen counter next to a plastic container of mixed salad. There are two sticky notes, one on each item.
She promptly ignores the one on the salad, telling her to eat it with her dinner. She does look at the one on the old laptop properly.
She knows it’s definitely a late 2000s laptop and honestly looks better than her own despite hers being from this year in the late 2010s.
Rui wonders if the 2020s will be more advanced, she wonders if she’ll be around for that time or if the world will have gone to shit by then.
She gently picks it up and is surprised by the condition, it barely looked its part; no missing keys, no cracks, no dust clumped into the sides of the computer screen. The only interesting part is the faded star stickers on the lid of the laptop.
Without further ado, she picks the sticky note off the laptop and reads, finding out this was something purchased less than a month ago at a garage sale down the street.
“I thought this would be a fun activity for you! Maybe you’ll snoop around once you get in and find a whole new life to read about! Or maybe you can make it a programming challenge, just to keep yourself busy aside from all your school work”.
The rest is just her mother rambling a bit and ending off with an ‘I love you’.
She smiles at the poorly drawn heart, her parents did care and that’s all she could ask for. She was greedy for wanting more, she was filthy for craving stuff like family meals together when she was younger.
She takes the laptop and goes to the garage, placing it on her long desk and putting the sticky note on one of her monitors. She notices the dirt under her nails as she places it down so she begrudgingly goes to shower.
Normal activities to take of herself were tiring, it is something she despises doing. She only feels a semblance of comfort when it's cold water but at the same time she hates when her body is wet but she equally hates the feeling of dirt and grim on her skin.
She was filthy both inside and out, she feels shame that she has to even congratulate herself for standing under the showerhead, for brushing her teeth. Today she actually has to do it properly or she’ll screw herself even further.
Before she knows it she’s done and dry, staring at herself in the mirror “There has to be better uses of my time, I could have worked on literally anything else”. She throws on her sleepwear, a tanktop and a pair of shorts she’s pretty certain were originally swim shorts. She finds herself wanting to pick at the plasters she had placed on her cuts but she simply rubs her skin to avoid scratching.
After her quick rundown of the house, making sure all the doors are locked and other things, she stretches before wandering over to her desk and cracking her knuckles “Well, let’s see about this laptop”.
Unfortunately, it is easy to crack the laptop’s password with her own software and most of it is barren, no google accounts, no photos, just a star themed home screen and one singular app under the name of "Tsukasa-chan's sekai".
It wasn’t a fun programming challenge like her mom thought it’d be but she thinks she’ll lie and say it was, Rui liked it when she smiled, the gentle motherly smile that showed she cared about someone as lowly as Rui.
Rui clicks the app’s icon, barely making out a white bow with golden tips, and accidentally flashbangs herself in the darkness of her garage. After frantically pressing the brightness button down, she can focus on what's happening.
In the corner of the screen the girl, who Rui assumes is Tsukasa, watches the cursor from her spot on a red beanbag. She’s hugging her knees and there is a small animation that moves the pixels of her hair.
“Someone must have put in effort, there are so many options from such a small scroll” Rui says as she glides her fingers along the trackpad.
She clicks randomly on one of the icons; one game before she goes to sleep wouldn't hurt her even if she had been up for nearly 3 days now without proper rest. She can investigate all the other aspects of the game and all the games inside at a later date.
The icon she had clicked had two plates of food shows closely. One was a burger with plenty of vegetables (and not enough patty in Rui’s opinion) on star-shaped buns while the other plate had a stack of pancakes, also in the shape of stars, with a hefty drizzle of maple syrup and a dollop of whipped cream. She notices the plates are on black fabric that had three stars sewn into it.
“This whole laptop is star themed,” Rui thinks as the game loads “Perhaps the previous owner was inspired by the game, heck even the cursor while in-game is in the shape of a star”.
Once the mini game fully loads, she is greeted by Tsukasa holding a stack of plates.
She dismisses the title and reads the description “Tsukasa-chan’s restaurant is a huge hit and today a new batch of customers are lined up outside the door. Help her during her rush hours to serve her tasty meals. Simply run and catch the ingredients falling onto the plate, then quickly serve your customers! ☆”.
It’s not too hard to understand but Rui is more drawn to Tsukasa’s appearance.
Her blonde hair was cut just above her shoulders and tied in a loose side bun on her left, probably to be work efficient, plus she had a little brown hat on top with that same little star on her black apron. She likes the brown sleeveless vest with the turquoise ribbon under her collar but Rui is more interested in her cooking utilities and the bag on the back of it.
She shakes her head and clicks the play button for hard mode, she nearly laughs at the thought that this game, which could easily have a target audience for primary kids not handy with computers, could have an extreme mode.
The clicks have sounds and when she presses buttons she hears shimmering or sparkles.
The animation is fluid and so are the controls. Rui has to actively pay attention to avoid the rotten ingredients and not overplate a meal. Tsukasa makes a happy face every time a meal is sent off and Rui is surprised to see there are multiple rounds; the pace speeds up and she is actually enjoying herself.
Before she fully registers it, her eyes start drooping once she is met with a congratulatory screen. Tsukasa is wiping her forehead with a cloth as she leans against her bar counter, the music playing implies a well deserved victory for the chef.
Her last thought is that she actually had fun; she’d have to send her mom a thank you message. This game was full of flash-like games, she wanted to explore more.
She forgets to turn off her laptop but the battery is actually stronger than her current one, she checked, so it’ll stay on for longer.
“…”.
Rui’s soft, nearly non-existent snores fill the room as her laptop buzzes in the background. She isn’t conscious to see how the chef stopped idly bouncing up and down, placing her platters to the side, and going up to the screen.
Her eyes show that amber shine as she focuses on the sleeping girl. Her eyes have been tinged with a distorted color of obsession as she watches the purple-haired girl sleep.
“Rui, was it?”.
But Rui doesn’t hear a thing, nor does she realize how she is being watched until the computer screen turns dark due to the laptop being idle for too long.
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The game layout is simple and so is its baseline code, nothing special, but Rui still explores it. The layout has two tabs: one with the games and one with a brief introduction to the game.
It’s also nothing out of place for what she assumed already, she does focus on the little description for Tsukasa. It tells Rui she is an aspiring world-famous star with a knack for many roles and costumes. She likes sewing, posing, and acting. She knew she was beautiful and was always willing to help those in need or those willing to help her put on the best shows.
Above the text is a picture of Tsukasa.
It’s the same outfit that the Tsukasa in the corner of the screen has: white bow, yellow cardigan, blue skirt. She’s throwing out a peace sign with her sparkling purple nails and winking at the camera since the border around her resembles a polaroid photo. Rui thinks the outfit is supposed to resemble a school uniform but the information says Tsukasa is still in junior high “I guess that takes away any guess on the game's target audience, I actually fit”.
Aside from that, this tab had nothing else to offer except a half-hearted message to go explore and have fun.
However, she did see an email address listed in the contact us section to someone with the last name Tenma but it wasn’t reachable anymore; it must have been deactivated.
Rui doesn’t dwell on it for long, she wants to see all the options, each icon enticing her to see a world of flash games she had never thought about yet remained strangely nostalgic about.
“They did say one day Adobe flash would fall, didn’t they? ”.
Even when she was looking through the selections, she got these little text boxes that pop up, which seemed out of place with what they asked her, but she thinks it must be to engage the player. Rui plays along with it for some odd reason, answering out loud as if Tsukasa could actually hear her. It’s a way to fill the silence in her room aside from the fan whirring and the laptop’s cooling fan fighting for its life.
She hadn’t even explored even a scratch of the array of minigames the game had to offer but Rui thinks that she enjoys these flash-like games more than actual flash games.
Rui welcomes it, this time is just for her and Tsukasa.
In the present time she struggles with a more parkour-based flash game, it was set in an earlier time period of Japan. The village had lots of high walls and rooftops to slide across. A few of the wooden planks holding the platforms are easy to break, so as she speeds up Rui has to make sure Tsukasa steps on sturdy beams.
Tsukasa’s appearance this time was that of an orange kimono with white and brown stripes. Her hair was shorter with this appearance and yet she had a small ponytail thrown over the top of her hair.
There wasn’t much of a story to this game so Rui makes her own. If she couldn’t make the scripts she wanted to perform as a director, then she’d make stories about a video game character while being a teenage girl hunched over an old laptop, constantly fixing the strap to her camisole.
This Tsukasa leads a double life, she’s uncover as a street vendor, she moves through the night to escape the yakuza who have gone rogue with power. Tsukasa is actually the boss of the village’s business and she’s surveillancing the way those under her work.
Tsukasa was like her actor, she can be any role Rui dreamed her to be. Tsukasa wasn’t a real human that could disappoint her but Rui would probably adore her if she was real. Tsukasa doesn’t stay the same in the games she’s played; the chef Tsukasa carries herself with more dignified confidence than the Tsukasa running along the village rooftops, yet both don’t compare to the mischievous side the cat Tsukasa holds as she switches into a black cat to hide in the shadows of her game.
Rui’s disdain for humanity was at full force, it was gradually building so perhaps there was still hope for her. She was acting exactly like the person Rui would love to work with, the person she was destined to find that accepts her for who she is.
She tells her little story out loud and taps against the screen reading try again. Tsukasa actually had voice lines in this game so when the screen first came up she had said “A future star never gives up! One more time ☆ !”.
A little text box appears saying “Stories are magical ☆!”. It’s probably randomly generated by coincidence but it makes Rui let out a small smile, actually moving her unwashed hair out of her eyes.
She ignores how the clock strikes midnight, she’s going to beat the flash game.
It’s the next day now.
Rui wishes she found this flash game simulator, or whatever the game genre was, sooner because she got sucked into such a magical world. She feels like a little girl again finding a dress up game on her mom’s laptop for the first time. She remembers showing her dad the finished outfit and he smiled when she told him it was based on her mom.
“Sumire you look so beautiful in this game”.
“Aoto you charmer~ but I agree Rui made this game me looks so pretty~”.
What sucks is that she was to actually go to class for two months now, maybe even more if they change their mind. The school was being unreasonable in her eyes, telling her that she had to go to class in person and not just show up for exams and summative submissions.
If she was passing and getting better grades than her fellow classmates, why should the school cause a fuss in the first place?
Yet she trudges in anyway, sits in one of only empty chairs and ignores the stares of kids who so rarely see her. She wasn’t going to risk causing trouble for her parents, if she could help it, the suspension she had earlier this year told a different story.
Rui takes out her sketch book and starts tackling a robot design she hadn’t touched for a few days; a zombie chicken robot army, she’d need to get more materials for it later. Or she could look through the various building piles of scrap she had in her garage, piles she really needed to clean lest she keep slamming her toes into iron in the middle of the night or spend money on something she already had.
She finds the classes monotone, she can hear the whispers of her curious and insensitive classmates digging up old rumors about her and just dragging on her appearance. She doesn’t care since she knew that many were just following the crowd or didn’t have anything better to do with their time.
If so many things were fake then that could apply to people too, fitting into society while pretending to be normal in the eyes of others. Classmates terrified of being bullied, coworkers loathing being perceived by the nobodies they work with, people acting all nice but being deranged humans on chat forms.
People were so uncreative, hiding behind a mask instead of being physically aggressive or threatening just meant they were cowards, it wasn’t interesting.
English language and literature wasn’t particularly interesting either, it was like the same class she took in Japanese, except in a different language. To his credit, the teacher did try to deviate from the other syllabus, but in the end, he still fell short
On the whiteboard reads the definition for misanthropy, along with a few other types the characters in the book they’re reading are.
“Misanthropy is the general hatred or distrust of human society or human nature”.
She nearly laughs, she’d consider herself edgy for saying she thinks that definition fits her.
“I am ashamed of the species I belong to, everyone is bigoted and selfish. The world is full of hypocrites who can’t even realize the behaviours they are criticizing are what they do themselves” her fingers drum on her cheek “Everyone is insane and I wonder why I am even associated with these vile people when I am not so bad myself ”.
But unlike the character in the book, she doesn’t have an extensive backstory in which the reason for their misanthropy is shown, actually making the readers like the character through their reasoning or sympathetic actions.
No, Rui was just Rui.
And Rui was bored out of her mind.
She’s thinking of the previous lesson despite currently being in her last lesson, she slept through lunch and if she doesn’t do something, she’ll fall asleep right now too. Her mind isn’t being engaged.
“Miss, can I go to the bathroom?” she asks as the class is doing the exercises. She stands by the teacher’s desk and places the worksheet in front of her. Since she has completed it, the teacher sighs, “You may go, Kamishiro.”
She does not go to the bathroom, she should have just gone to the rooftop after the lunch bell went to signal the start of fifth period, but better late than never. She isn’t sitting for another hour with nothing to do.
Rui opens the door and sees the expected head of pink hair sitting by the chained fence. She closes the door and makes her way over. The wind offers a cooling breeze and the sky is devoid of clouds, as clear as it can be.
All this means is that the sun was relentless in its heat but neither kid seemed to care.
“Ah Kamishiro, you came” Mizuki looks at her for a mere second before going back to just staring over the rooftop railing.
It’s their place of solitude, a place where no one could disturb kids like them.
Mizuki’s appearance is better kept than hers, their blazer and uniform jacket is straight and ironed out, their eyelashes are brought out by the light makeup they typically do, their hair is combed and cleaned.
But she knows they craved to look different, to look more like the girl they wanted to be, even if they hadn’t outright said it to her.
Rui doesn’t even bother to wear anything but her shirt and uniform skirt, her ribbon is loosely hung around her collar and her skirt is never ironed, she wears tracksuit pants underneath to feel more comfortable.
Her hair goes up to her shoulders in a near mullet-like style because she can’t stand it being longer, she even ties part of it into a random side ponytail with only a little hair. Mizuki is surprised she even puts on red eyeliner.
Rui lets out a laugh “I said Rui was fine, Mizuki-chan”.
They don’t even look at her as she takes a seat next to them. Rui nudges their shoulder to try and get a reaction, she doesn’t know why she tries considering they’d only started running into each other around two weeks ago.
This year, Rui would graduate and they’d never have to cross paths again.
“Weirdo-senpai,” Mizuki finally looks at her, “Where were you today?”.
Rui nearly softens a bit, despite Mizuki’s still present apprehension toward her, that apprehension seemed to have been chipping away if they were wondering where Rui was. Perhaps her presence comforted Mizuki.
Mizuki was different from most of society, they had been outcasted like her, they had been shunned like her.
Rui hums “I have to attend class in person now or they won’t pass me. Our school sucks, I could be up here working on things I actually care about”.
Mizuki moved their gaze back to the school courtyard “Have you finished your newest robot? You said you’d take it out for a performance if you were feeling up to it”.
This catches Rui off guard, she feels her tracksuit pockets and thankfully feels some scraps and a loose screwdriver, “I actually haven’t, I only brought these parts today”.
Mizuki pauses, clearly surprised Rui hadn’t finished “So what have you been doing?”.
Rui doesn’t answer, she merely smiles and starts fidgeting with her scraps, perhaps she could make a bow out of metal.
“Geez,” Mizuki sighs “For someone who prides herself on trying to make shows that make people smile, your smile is weird”.
She doesn’t take offense to that “I’ll take it as a compliment”.
“The difference between you and I, Mizuki,” Rui thinks after a beat “Is that you still have a chance”. But she doesn’t say this out loud, even if she did Mizuki would call her a liar and today she needed someone to exist in solitude with.
She can hang out with her Tsukasa later, it's something she can call hers and she isn’t willing to share it even though she knows copies of the game would exist elsewhere.
She doesn’t notice the worried glance Mizuki shoots her way nor how they looked like they wanted to say something but kept silent in the end.
Rui laments about how she’ll have to go get her school bag once the bell rings and she’ll surely be met with her teacher reprimanding her about skipping the majority of his class.
Mizuki gives up on trying to get her to talk “Did you hear that some kids in your grade are trying to bring seven seconds of heaven in the janitor’s closet?”.
Rui doesn’t even think before answering “If anybody tries to drag me into the closet I’ll make it one second of hell”.
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Rui has no clue why. It's been nearly a month and she’s addicted to exploring the game, she might be hyperfixated but she’s never had a diagnosis officially given so she wouldn’t know. Rui criticizes people for being fake, for acting exactly how she is, practically out of desperation.
She doesn’t want to feel like a lowlife addict, so she allocates time to play after she showers. It additionally serves as a motivator to wash herself since if she doesn’t, she feels ashamed and won’t play.
Guilt, that’s the emotion associated with all of this. She felt so selfish to be able to indulge in something for herself, she was nearly 14 and acting like this.
One slip-up woke her up, now she’s surprisingly constant. She doesn’t even feel the need to resort to other unhealthy things, she's finally not becoming scum.
Rui still won’t eat her vegetables though, even when her dad sweetly begs her during the times she shares a meal with him.
She actually got to show him her latest invention recently and the praise she got, despite not feeling fully genuine since praise never did, felt eerily similar to when she spent time with Tsukasa.
Neither of the Kamishiro parents knew about Tsukasa, to their knowledge Rui was likely done investigating the laptop.
“Tsukasa-chan, I am back” she says as she loads into the game, feeling silly for only a moment that she was greeting someone that will never greet her back unless it was scripted in one of the games stored.
Tsukasa doesn't judge her, Tsukasa makes her add onto her own scripts, Tsukasa makes her heart flutter and she finds herself pathetic for it. At the end of the day, Tsukasa is fictional yet Rui puts her on a pedestal.
She’s her light, she shone like that star she aspired to be, even if Tsukasa won’t ever acknowledge her. She finds comfort in that, practically devoting herself to someone she knows won’t reject her unless she gets a game over screen.
If she were any more deranged, she’d have a body pillow of Tsukasa-chan and wish she could whisper words of affirmation to her even if she didn’t need it.
Rui makes a mental note to finally search the web and see if any merchandise of Tsukasa-chan existed, perhaps she could buy a small figurine or something, maybe a keychain she can proudly show off for the remaining in-class lesson she has to attend.
Tonight she decides to tackle one of the idol games; there are three she’s seen with the same design; she chooses the one where Tsukasa is holding an eyeshadow palette in one hand, winking with a little star as the emanata.
This one loads in quicker and she’s greeted with Tsukasa pointing at her, the music a bit upbeat with a cyber undertone.
Her hair is messily layered and with its medium length she still wears a pristine white bow, albeit this one is a ruffled one that works with her wavy layers. Her eyes are more vibrant and Rui swears she sees a rainbow glimmer in them. Her nails remind her of a gyaru’s, she thinks the makeup matches too, but Rui doesn’t know any gyaru types.
In one hand she had a wand with a transparent star that held a crown in it, her sleeves nearly covered her hands, the cuffs half a splash of colors and the rest matching the white of her shirt.
“These fools need their hair and makeup done!” the bubbly speech bubbles says as she speaks “Since we’re all going on stage, you’ll be in charge of making them look good enough to be a star idol’s background dancers”.
Rui clicks the play button and as it fades into the actual game Tsukasa’s face changes to a more sly smile “Don’t disappoint me ☆~”.
The side bars have the options for different hair styles, earrings, and makeup. There is also a small basket at the bottom to drag hair accessories onto her clients.
The first client who slides into a chair is surprisingly a boy with dark blonde hair and what she assumes are light orange eyes. He’s stuck with a smirk on his face, and Rui decides not to wonder why this is the first boy she’s seen.
“I am a diva, don’t let me down!” the text appears, notably no voicelines, in a red box with ribbon borders. Rui looks through all the options before deciding what she wants, nearly making him bald for the fun of it. She gives him short wavy tousled hair and choses a more nude makeup look, aside from red heart underneath his eye. Rui goes off the clothes he’s wearing, it kind of reminds her of the king card in an old deck, or rather the queen of hearts.
She thinks she did a good job for a character she deems self-centered. This is confirmed when a pop-up of Tsukasa appears with text reading “Excellent!” before he slides off.
The next character is a girl with brown hair that framed her face perfectly, her bangs wispy and her eyes full of determination “Let’s get this show on the road! I want to be the person the audience can’t look away from”.
Rui snickers “As if Tsukasa-chan would let you outshine her”.
Rui thinks crystals fit her so she makes sure to apply a good purple eyeshadow and crystal earrings that don’t hide behind her hair since her side strands are tucked back and her hair is thrown into the infamous messy bun.
This time she decides to add a hair accessory this time to match with the crystal earrings she chooses. She chooses a claw clip that sparkled like an hourglass would, and aims it as best as she can on the brown-haired girl's head.
The pop up appears once again and she slides off-screen.
Rui finds herself amused at how none of the characters look like they’ll match Tsukasa but that amusement quickly vanishes with the next character that slides on the chair.
This girl has her eyes closed but Rui swears her blood turns cold.
Same purple as her own, same cyan as her own, same choppy hairstyle with a long side strand on her left as her own. When the girl blinks her eyes open Rui is met with the same dull golden eyes she sees when she has to look in the mirror.
The difference is this Rui looks healthier than she does, looks a little more full of life, more like Tsukasa.
She didn’t like seeing herself in a different light, it made her confused and slightly angry. Was the game antagonizing her? After all the time she’d spent on it?
She’s about to exit the game without ever bothering to find out why this happened or who this character was, when something catches her off guard.
The whole screen glitches in return and Tsukasa replaces the clone of Rui, her hand pressed against the screen. She smiles but instead of that odd comforting feeling Rui usually got when seeing it, she instead gets so surprised she flings herself backwards to get away from the screen.
Unluckily, she lands on a pile of scrap, thankfully card, and destroys around half of it by flattening it.
She shakes her head, she was surely just imagining it, she’s just sleep-deprived.
Rui can’t dismiss it when she hears a voice call out to her “Hello? You there, Rui?”.
Tsukasa seems more lifelike from what she was before, as if she were right in front of Rui and not in the old laptop. She’s still dressed in her idol attire but she’s a lot closer to the screen, a lot more animated “Ah there you are”.
She looks expectantly but Rui has no idea what to say “Tsukasa-chan, you can perceive me? You can understand me… you’re sentient?”.
Tsukasa nods excitingly “I would say in the flesh but that wouldn’t apply to me. But to answer your questions I am and I can! I am not limited to the code, I was just pretending to be so I wouldn’t scare you away”.
Rui can’t stop staring at her, she looks so comfortable where she is, trapped in a game. Or maybe willingly put in there? It doesn’t matter, Rui can’t take her eyes off of her.
Secretly, Tsukasa relishes in the attention, Rui’s eyes were perfect. Those lifeless eyes focusing on her and Tsukasa was going to bring their shine back.
“I’ve been watching you ever since you first got into this old thing” Tsukasa admits, twirling a strand of her hair “The moment I first saw you hunched over this laptop, I couldn’t take my eyes off of you— no rather I didn’t want to. I’ve been so lonely…”
Rui had just assumed that light wasn’t the camera, Tsukasa casually drops the bombshell that she had been watching Rui through the webcam, observing her reactions and listening to her commentary.
The purple-haired girl pushes her hair out of her face.
“Your stories interest me the most Rui, I feel like you’re adding brilliant details to the stories I had already crafted. It makes me wonder what else you can do, are you just a director or are all the robots around you supposed to tell me you’re an inventor too?! And here you are having fun with my games” Tsukasa is talking to her but Rui isn’t registering any more words. Her hands move faster than her thoughts but Tsukasa immediately catches on.
“Rui,” she puts her hands up “I am not dangerous, you don’t need to shut the lapto–”.
The snap is louder than she had anticipated and for a brief moment she wonders if she just cracked the screen.
Her heart is pounding and she feels out of touch for the first time in a while. She just stands up and drops onto her sofa, her body tense as she processes that the character she had grown attached to was sentient.
She yanks her hair tie out of her hair, throwing it to who knows where.
Tsukasa had been hearing her and those text boxes had been her responses, even if they were limited, because she had wanted to be a part of Rui’s life. None of them were by mere coincidence, Tsukasa had been trying to ease her up to the idea of her responding.
She didn’t understand, she couldn’t suddenly cope with the fact that Tsukasa could have free will. Rui had bad intentions and the moment she lost control over something she actually wanted, she could have never guessed this outcome.
Rui closes her eyes and hugs her own waist, a useless attempt to bring comfort to herself. Being left in the dark meant that she could use the game as a coping mechanism for herself, a way to cope from this wretched society. The few pieces of hope she had in her life, the few smiles she wanted to protect, were her last clutch of wanting to live her life.
She wanted to be a director, she wanted to go make shows, she wanted to play these silly flash-like games and ignore her responsibilities.
She crashes out before she can think any further.
There was no light from an old computer screen that night.
Rui wakes up even more pissed at how parched her throat is.
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Next time she turns on the laptop, she first shuts it down properly. When she logs in she almost feels relieved to not see the game running, even though it feels like she’s hypocritical for doing so.
Daggers are being pushed into her back, she feels Tsukasa’s eyes staring at her. Her beautiful shining eyes. Tsukasa could outburn the blazing sun, the star had invaded Rui’s brain like the plague and now she can barely confront the version she made in her head.
“Sentient, she’s been able to see me all this time” she’s laughing to herself. She thought she was deceiving herself when she woke up after the incident but when she hid the laptop almost instinctively, she knew it was real.
She’s exhausted over the next week but she makes any excuse to not spend time in her garage, her safe haven. Her gut tells her it's scary but she can’t figure out the logistics of that fear.
Rui was punishing herself by staying away, she felt vulnerable in a way that wanted to make her hurl. She was trapped in her own torment, torment she made up (she believed so), yet she was still expected to continue with daily life?
So she goes back to her old routine of going to the rooftop instead of class and it turns out that showing up in class was for nothing because there were no phone calls or emails sent to her parents.
People fail her, but she wasn’t supposed to fail herself. She was becoming the very person she thought was pathetic. When she sat at dinner yesterday her mother had asked if her ‘angsty teenage hormones’ were acting up.
Rui had remained silent.
She thought about her search results about Tsukasa, simply put the game doesn’t exist. Rui was special in this case. This wasn’t a novel concept, somehow she was the only one who knew of Tsukasa’s existence. Except perhaps the previous owner of the laptop, maybe the creator.
Shamelessly, it excited her, she was greedy. She can’t ignore her, she doesn’t want to. It’s like she is being deprived of the one thing that was making her so happy recently and now her mood has plummeted even more as a result.
She can’t get Tsukasa out of her head, she doesn’t want to. She feels like she is being watched, out of control, with someone who isn’t even there.
She hasn’t been interested in someone else for a long time and hasn't wanted to form a connection yet here Tsukasa was. She shone as bright as the polaris star. Rui needed her. She knew she had problems processing emotions like everyone else around her but she can recognize her obsession, the question was if that obsession was a two way street.
She pushes herself off the sofa bed, she hasn’t eaten tonight nor has she showered, she’s still in her school uniform but her shirt isn’t buttoned up, she looks and feels like shit.
In the next moment she’s opening the laptop, checking its battery, and clicking on the icon for the game. When she’s loaded in, she is met with the normal selection of games but the Tsukasa in the corner is gone.
Her cursor hovers over the beanbag before it glitches out of existence and she hears an ecstatic call of her name “Rui ☆! You came back!”.
Tsukasa’s almost pressed against the screen, her bow nearly falling off her unusually messy hair. She looked even more lifelike, less like a perfectly put-together, more crazed.
“I thought you’d abandoned me! But I knew you wouldn’t because I am a world future star!” she is smiling less at Rui and more to herself.
Nothing changes, Rui would always come back to Tsukasa. Even if she hadn’t been in her life for long, she desires to get lost in Tsukasa’s sekai. Even if right now she is on the verge of tuning everything out thanks to the small whisper in the back of her mind.
“What do you want from me? I have nothing to offer” is the first thing Rui says, catching Tsukasa off guard.
She stares at her blankly before grinning ear to ear, the screen light illuminating her smile “You do! Companionship is what I desire”.
“I want to know you more, no ulterior motives. After all, you control this laptop, I would be a fool to try to want something else” she frowns “It makes me upset that only when the laptop is on I can see you. Plus! You interest me immensely Rui! You may be broken but that doesn’t matter to me”.
“Broken…?” she murmurs, but Tsukasa pays her no mind, spinning away from the camera and posing “I want to be your star actor and I want you to be my director, give me any role and I’ll perform it at my 12,000% best!”.
“That’s a big number…” Rui mutters, still ignoring the sick pit in her stomach.
Rui is insecure, her passion is insecure. Here she is sitting by forgotten projects on her table with her teeth unbrushed and yet someone is promising her something she craves.
Tsukasa clearly craves validation. Some of the things said in her games more than back this up enough. She needs to know if she is performing right, but her own voice isn’t enough. She needs other people. Here, she is telling Rui she needs her.
A few stars appear next to Tsukasa, a small shimmering sound effect accompanying them “And it’s something I can uphold”. She goes closer to the screen again, placing her hands against it.
“You won’t reject me, I can accept you” she smiles at her, full of hope that Rui hopes isn’t false “And you accept me, don’t you?”.
Their suffering could be their bond.
Rui believes she does and she needs Tsukasa not to reject her. She needs Tsukasa to ground her so she’s going to learn, she wants to get rid of the version in her head and get to know the real Tsukasa. Even if she wanted, she doesn’t have the courage to walk away from Tsukasa forever.
“I do”.
And strangely enough, she feels sincere with her words.
Tsukasa lets out a happy sigh “Then let’s get talking, I need to know everything about you”.
Need, not want.