[LOBBY 2 – PART A]

Masaru lifts his gaze up to the ceiling fan, spinning away in its perfect, silent hellscape of a room.

With a slight frown, he takes in a deep breath only to let out a slow, rolling sigh.

“Goddamn.”

He lies back in bed for a moment in a state of both humility and guilt. He’s sure Valerie’s dying at the hands of that monster right now, or at least not long ago if he really does wake up right after he dies.

Sitting up, he thinks about her going to her fourth battle without him. He thinks about her [RES] stat and then wonders how she’s doing after he screw it all up so badly.

He blinks dully in his bed for a moment and then closes his eyes.

His breathing slows as he tries to remember Valerie’s advice in the plains.

Almost on command, it appears.

[RES] 43/100

He laughs as he opens his eyes.

“Not so bad, eh?” he mumbles to himself with a smile, but it’s short lasted.

Masaru thinks back to the swamp, and how sure he was of everything.

He flings back into his bed for a moment, to rest his head on the (just a little too warm) pillow.

I really did just ruin that again, didn’t I? He thinks.

The room is good, but only just good enough.

He can’t stay here and reflect, after all, he’s learned just a little about each enemy.

“I’m coming for all of you,” he says, his gaze sharpening as he pushes up from his spot on the bed and takes to his feet.

Looking over to his briefcase, sitting dutifully at the side of his bed, he takes it up and opens it again.

This time, there’s nothing inside.

The salaryman scoffs. “Not even paper this time, huh?” he asks as he tosses it aside onto his bed. “Yeah, you’re the garbage.” Masaru snips at his briefcase as he starts out of his room.

He exits 359, goes past 358, and rounds the corner to the elevator.

Pressing the button, the too-perfect doors open to reveal one of the doctor mannequins, its muscles bristling out of its white coat like some kind of soap opera character.

With a close eye on the figure, Masaru scoots in and touches the button for floor one: it was already lit up.

The doors close, and the two go down.

“I’m onto your game, bitch,” Masaru snips at the doctor.

The tall, chiseled mannequin looks over to him and adjusts its thin-rimmed glasses as the doors open.

“Tsk. Think you’re too good for me?” Masaru asks.

The doctor gives a short, professionally friendly wave as it steps out of the elevator car.

Masaru clenches his teeth as he stands there an extra second. He won’t admit it, but that thing is pretty cool.

He follows the doctor to the lobby. It seems like it has some business here this time.

Masaru pauses as the mannequin stops right where the hallway connects to the lobby. It stops to look around the room, only to stop its search when it sees the misted silhouette of a person by the vending machine. Masaru furrows his brow as he realizes the person probably hadn’t moved for the entire time he’s been away.

“What’s up?” Masaru asks, not sure what he’d receive back.

The girl from before looks up to him with nerve-wracked eyes, the pencil in her hand trembling as she turns her back on the person at the vending machine. She looks back to her drawing and continues to tremble out some truly uneven strokes. It’s like she’s not even paying attention.

For context, Masaru glances over to Sato, who’s awash in the bliss of a back massage from one of the mannequin nurses as another feeds him grapes by the sphere.

Finally, he looks to Kenji, his rifle slung low, whose been watching him this entire time. Kenji isn’t pulled into emotion, or if he is it’s not clear. He just watches Masaru with a measured, calm expression, but with eyes that relay some kind of urgency— some kind of danger that Masaru hasn’t yet picked up on.

The salaryman looks around, his gaze settling on the doctor-thing as it watches the silhouette of a person by the vending machine.

After a few more seconds, it steps forward, reaching its hand out for the silhouette’s shoulder.

A few seconds pass, and the silhouette, like the glow of the moon, turns its head to see it.

With the person’s thin light shining in its glasses, it gives them a slow, affirming nod.

The silhouette nods back, and then the doctor signals down the hall to one of the nurses.

The girl, her pencil lifted from the page, struggles to manage her breath.

“What’s… going on?” Masaru asks as his focus hones in on the silhouette. He’s not sure why he’s focusing in now, but it’s just so much easier. He has to know how they’re feeling.

But a part of him wishes he didn’t.

[RES] 0/100

Masaru’s eyes widen as he watches one of the pretty nurse things push in a wheelchair.

The girl with the pencil gets to her feet and steps in the nurse’s path. It’s such an abrupt movement that even Sato glances over from his haven of bland food and unliving bodies.

“Please, don’t take her away!” she cries out. “She doesn’t want to go!”

Masaru feels a weird turn in his stomach, as if he’s witnessing something that terrified him as a child, but he’s all but forgotten as an adult.

The frail uselessness of the silhouette as it rests on the strong frame of the doctor. The look, or better yet the aura of defeat in its body, emanating from every part of its being: surrender.

“Please stop! Please! Please!” the girl cries at the top of her shaking lungs.

The doctor does its best not to pile fuel on the flame. It picks up the silhouette like a little princess and steps around the young girl who grabs at its coattails. It’s close enough, however, for the doctor to let down the silhouette into the wheelchair, and off down the hall.

The girl, weak from emotion, falls to her knees and begins weeping.

Kenji gets up and steps over to her as Masaru passes by Sato, already back to his business of doing nothing in particular.

The hairs raise on his back as he follows the nurse through a corner to the left. He can’t quite place it. It’s so surreal, but unlike the nightmares of his youth, this is real.

The nurse stops at room 164 and steps inside.

Masaru picks up his pace to get inside. The door’s already locked.

“Shit,” the word fires through his mind like a bolt as he desperately tries the doorknob.

His gaze locks to the gap at the bottom of the door: a cool air blows onto his brown leather shoes, chilling his ankles like the grasps of a million frozen needles.

Refusing to back down, he steps forward into the cold. It’s so painful that it feels like it’s about to cause his ankles to snap, but he perseveres: he has to know.

By the time he redoubles his efforts and actually gets his hand back on the doorknob, it turns.

The shapely mannequin dressed as a nurse steps out to meet him.

“Get out of my way,” Masaru warns, his eyes squinting with a critical edge.

The nurse doesn’t react, it simply collapses the now-empty wheelchair, scoots out of the way as if it were always intending to do so, and fixes the wheelchair back to send on its way. The nurse even gives a gentle bow as it passes out of sight, but Masaru turns his gaze to track it.

There’s not even an air of smugness to it. No victory, no emotion— it’s almost as if it were simply completing its day-to-day duties.

Masaru watches it step off to somewhere else, leaving him alone to the hospital room.

He reaches to widen the cracked door, but he’s slower than he thought he’d be when it comes to finding out. A part of him knows what to expect, but the implication doesn’t hit him until he sees it.

It’s another hospital room exactly like his own, but the fan’s off, and there’s no one there.

Masaru hears the distant sobbing of the girl as he tries to interpret what he’s looking at.

There’s no body at all, simply a red flashlight lying on the pillow of a perfectly-made bed.

The mounting dread shoots down from the back of his neck down into the core of his soul.

“No one… there,” he says before swallowing his stress with a gulp.

Nothing dramatic, nothing gory or hideous. It’s just no one.

Whatever person that was pushed into the room is now gone— no corpse, no floating spirit, no sign of them except for what they had left behind.

The girl’s continuous crying from the lobby provides a discordant backdrop to his realization.

“No one there!” he says again, this time with twice the breath.

He steps forward for the bed. The flashlight calls out to him in some certain, silent way, as if begging to be remembered as the person’s last memory.

With trembling hands, Masaru leans down and touches it.

His eyes flash as images, experiences, sounds and smells crash through his mind like a tsunami into a bay.

Images of other people, disgusting moments, the overwhelming feeling of being used, and yet useless at the same time, the feeling of a person’s mere gaze like as razorblade across the skin.

He sees Valerie, smiling as she flashed a prescription bottle of some kind in a familiar alleyway.

…And behind her, Masaru can see that cat.

The girl’s crying is no longer audible, but even if it were, Masaru wouldn’t notice it.

His eyes maintain a confused desperation as he attempts to understand just what the hell he’s holding in his hands.

“Is this…” he clears his throat of his disbelief. “Yeah, just like her rifle.”

That’s right, just when he took up Valerie’s rifle to face The Knight, he felt a pulse, some kind of energy of the will course through him.

“These are… reflections of a life,” he whispers to himself.

“Someone who died because they figured out what you’re trying to deny,” a little, horrible voice adds in the back of Masaru’s mind.

He struggles with his shortening breath. It’s like part of his soul’s been scraped out with a rusty spoon.

Barely maintaining his balance, he pushes himself up with the flashlight in tow and vacates the room to the lobby.

“That’s going to be me,” the little voice squeaks into his mind.

Masaru pulls in slowly but weakly as he prepares to recite the mantra. “That’s going to be…” he stops.

The sight of Valerie with a careless, bemused expression as she flaunted the pill bottle is still singed into his skull. The longer he holds onto that bright red flashlight, the clearer the images become.

It’s not simply a feeling of being used, it’s feelings of betrayal. This person felt betrayed, she felt as though she had betrayed someone else.

He lumbers into the lobby, and who else should be there, but Valerie.

Her eyes look up from the crying girl, and immediately to the flashlight in Masaru’s hands. Her pale skin chills into an even whiter hue.

“Give that to me,” she demands, her eyes turned to the floor.