Chapter 2: The Confession

The suite has transformed into an interrogation room.

Hana doesn't move from her position near the window. The distance gives her clear sightlines to all exits and puts the winter sun behind her, making her expression harder to read. Standard positioning for extracting information from reluctant subjects.

Old habits.

The others have arranged themselves on the couches—Sora in the center, posture rigid with authority; Rei to her left, arms crossed, watching Hana with wary eyes; Miya curled into the corner of the loveseat, making herself as small as possible. Yuki stands apart from the group, her arms wrapped around herself, still crying silently.

"Start talking," Hana says, adding a frightening “now.”

"Hana—" Sora begins.

"That's not my name." The words cut through the room. "I don't know what my name is supposed to be right now, but 'Hana' isn't it. So whoever's going to explain what happened has about thirty seconds before I walk out that door and find answers somewhere else."

Threat of departure. Establishes urgency without violence.

The cold voice in her head sounds almost approving.

"You can't leave," Rei says flatly. "Contract says—"

"I didn't sign any contract."

"Actually," Sora interrupts, her voice careful, "you did. Three months ago. Your signature is on file with Crescent Moon Entertainment, along with your identification, residence permit, and entertainment visa. The paperwork is pristine."

Hana's jaw tightens. "I wasn't here three months ago."

"According to every record that exists, you were." Sora meets her gaze without flinching. "According to our memories—the memories we had until about fifteen minutes ago—you've been with us since October. We met at auditions. You were nervous but talented. You struggled with the choreography at first but worked harder than anyone to catch up."

"And now?"

"Now I remember that differently." Sora's composure cracks, just slightly. "I remember October clearly—rehearsals, vocal training, your first photoshoot. But I also remember that you weren't there. Both memories exist simultaneously. It's... disorienting."

Reality alteration. Affects documentation, perception, memory. Extensive magical investment required.

The warm voice again. Hana files the information away.

"Yuki," she says. "You're going to tell me exactly what happened. Every detail. And if I think you're lying or leaving something out, I will make you regret it."

Yuki flinches as if struck. But she nods.

"Last night," she begins, her voice unsteady. "After midnight. I went to the pool deck to be alone. There's... someone I lost. A friend. Someone important. The anniversary of her death is January first, and I couldn't—" She stops. Breathes. "I couldn't stay at the party.So I left.”

"Continue."

"You were already there. I didn't recognize you. You looked... different. Older. A man." The word comes out almost apologetically. "American, I think. You were sitting on one of the lounge chairs, staring at the city. You asked if I was okay."

The memory surfaces again: Yuki's tear-streaked face illuminated by distant fireworks. The weight of her grief, palpable even to a stranger.

"I stayed," Hana says. Not a question.

"For hours. You just... listened. You didn't try to fix anything or make me feel better. You just let me talk about Mari—that's her name, my friend—and you held my hand while I cried." Yuki's voice cracks. "It was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me."

Genuine emotion. Truth baseline established.

"Then what?"

Yuki's face crumples.

"I wished for it to last," she whispers. "I was holding your hand and thinking about how much I wanted to feel safe like that forever, and I thought—I wished—that you could stay with us. That you could understand what we're going through. That you could be part of..." She trails off, unable to continue.

Sora picks up the thread. "What Yuki doesn't understand—what none of us fully understand—is that her wish activated something. Magic."

"Magic," Hana repeats flatly.

"I know how it sounds."

"You don't."

"Our manager—Ms. Ren Hayashi, we call her Ms. Manager—comes from a family with certain... abilities. Most of the knowledge has been lost, but fragments remain. Enough to do what was done to you." Sora's voice stays clinical, detached—the voice of someone explaining a technical process. "Transformation. Reality alteration. Memory implantation. The spell was supposed to be complete. You were supposed to accept your new identity without question."

"But I didn't."

"No. Something went wrong. Or something went right, depending on perspective. You resisted the mental component. You remember who you were."

Hana's hands are shaking. She notices this distantly, as if observing someone else's body.

Control. Maintain control.

"The others," she says. "Rei. Miya. You." She looks at each of them in turn. "You said this happened to me. Does that mean it didn't happen to you?"

Silence.

Then, slowly, Rei raises her hand.

"Seventeen months," she says. Her voice is flat, stripped of emotion. "I aged out of male idol training. Too short, they said. Wrong face shape for the pretty boy aesthetic. Ms. Manager offered me an alternative."

Miya speaks next, barely above a whisper. "Three years. When you’re 17 and still look 10 as a boy its creepy, but a girl and everyone things its cute."

Sora doesn't look away from Hana. "Two years. I started getting a lot of crossdressing rolls when I was younger, and I think I got type cast, so when that whole trend went south, so did my career.”

Hana turns to Yuki.

"Two years," Yuki confirms but says nothing more.

Five transformed individuals. Pattern suggests deliberate recruitment strategy rather than random chance.

No—Yuki's was accidental. The others were consensual. Different categories of violation.

The voices overlap in Hana's head, analyzing, cataloging.

"Can it be reversed?"

The question falls into silence.

"We don't know," Sora admits finally. "Ren says she believes so. The original spell is one thing—reversal is apparently much more complicated she thinks.”

"Convenient."

"I know."

Hana paces to the window, then back. Her body wants to move, to act, to do something physical to discharge the building pressure in her chest.

Violence won't help. Information gathering first. Escape planning second.

Maybe they're telling the truth. Maybe they're victims too.

Victims don't trap other people. They had choices. You didn't.

The voices war with each other. Hana presses her palms against her temples, trying to quiet them.

"Where is she?"

"Who?"

"Ms. Manager. Ren. Whoever's responsible for this arrangement."

Yuki's face goes even paler. "She's... avoiding you. She knew you'd want answers once you realized. She's been waiting for the spell to settle, hoping the resistance would fade."

"And when it didn't?"

"She asked us to keep you calm. To help you adjust. To not tell you the truth until she figured out how to handle it."

The laugh that escapes Hana is harsh and humorless.

"Handle it," she repeats. "Like I'm a problem to be managed."

"That's not—"

"Where is she?"

Yuki's shoulders hunch. "She has a room on this floor. 1812. But Hana, please—"

Hana is already moving.

"Wait!" Sora rises, stepping into her path. "If you confront her now, while you're like this—"

"Like what?" Hana's voice drops to something cold and quiet. "Angry? Betrayed? Out of control?" She meets Sora's eyes. "You don't know me. None of you do. You know a version of me that was programmed to fit your group dynamic. The real me—the person you people erased—has been doing things you can't imagine for longer than you've been alive."

Don't reveal capabilities. Don't—

Sora, in a confident manner responds,

“I doubt it, what could you possibly do that we can’t imagine.”

With a coy but evil smile she responds,

"I'm a spy. I killed people for a living, and yes, the coldest blood DOES run though my veins."

The group looks at her stunned, and a bit like she’s crazy.

She steps around Sora.

"Hana—"

"Don't follow me."

The door slams behind her.

Room 1812 is at the end of the hall. Hana's footsteps are silent on the plush carpet—a habit, she notes distantly, that her body maintained even through transformation. She reaches the door and raises her hand to knock, then stops.

Two ways in. Main entrance, service access through the connecting room. Security latch engaged—she's barricaded herself.

Good. That means she's scared.

Hana knocks. Three sharp raps.

Silence.

"Ms. Hayashi." Her voice carries through the heavy door. "I know you're in there. I know what you did. And I know you're hoping that if you hide long enough, the magic will finish what it started and I'll forget to be angry."

Nothing.

"That's not going to happen. Whatever resistance I have—whatever part of me you couldn't overwrite—it's getting stronger, not weaker. So you can open this door and answer my questions now, or you can wait for me to find another way in. Your choice."

The silence stretches.

Then, finally, the click of a lock disengaging.

The door opens to reveal a woman in her early thirties. Long dark hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. Sharp features, professional makeup, tailored clothing even at eight in the morning. Her expression is composed, but her eyes are shadowed with something Hana can't immediately identify.

"Come in," Ren Hayashi says. "We need to talk about your contract."

Hana doesn't move.

"Contract," she repeats. "You mean the document I supposedly signed three months ago, before this existed?"

"Yes. That one." Ren steps back, opening the door wider. "I can explain. Some of it, at least. Not all—there are things I don't understand myself. But you deserve whatever truth I can give you."

Calculated admission of vulnerability. Building trust through apparent honesty.

Or she's genuinely remorseful.

Irrelevant. She did this. Remorse changes nothing.

Hana enters the room.

It's larger than the suite she woke up in, with a small conference table near the window and a wall of electronics—monitors, laptops, a printer churning out documents. Ren has been working. Multiple tabs open on the nearest screen: legal text, medical information, what looks like airline bookings.

"Flight to Tokyo tomorrow," Hana observes, reading the itinerary upside down from across the room. "All five of us plus you. Performances scheduled starting next week."

Ren nods, unsurprised by the display of awareness. "Crescent Moon Entertainment has significant investments in this group. We can't afford to delay the promotional schedule."

"We?"

"My family's company. My grandfather founded it. I inherited it along with... other things."

"Like the ability to turn people into something they're not."

Ren doesn't flinch. "Yes."

"And you're going to tell me why."

It's not a question.

Ren crosses to the conference table and sits. Her posture is controlled but not defensive—she's leaving space for Hana to take the dominant position, offering a kind of surrender.

Strategic submission. Reducing perceived threat to facilitate information extraction.

"Sit down," Ren says. "Please. This will take a while."

Hana remains standing.

Ren sighs. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything. But start with the reversal. Can you undo this?"

Pause.

"I don't know."

"Not good enough."

"It's the truth." Ren's voice tightens, just slightly. "My family ran a shrine known as the Nichome shrine, but it was also called the Miracle shrine as it survived the entire war without a scratch, despite the bombings. Of course that was decades ago and what war machines couldn’t take, the power of money did. Honestly I though the power of the shine was a myth until recently. What I have are fragments—enough to perform transformations, enough to alter the perception of reality around those transformed, but not enough to reverse the process. The knowledge for that was lost decades ago, maybe longer."

"Convenient," Hana says again.

"I know how it sounds. But consider this: why would I trap you intentionally? Yuki's wish was an accident. She is my niece, and she had been studying what I have with me, and was there for the others transformations, I didn’t know she could do one on her own. When she brought you to me, half-transformed and unconscious, I had to complete the process or watch you get stuck somewhere in between, which would have been far worse. Those were my options."

Possible truth.

Or she's lying to justify what she did deliberately.

"So I'm stuck?"

"For now. There may be ways to find the missing knowledge. Old texts, other practitioners. I've been researching."

"How long?"

Ren hesitates.

"The contract runs two years."

Hana laughs. The sound is jagged, wrong in this voice. "The contract I never agreed to. The contract with my forged signature on a reality that didn't exist until someone wished it into being."

"The contract that legally binds you to Crescent Moon Entertainment regardless." Ren's voice is gentler than her words. "I'm not proud of this. I'm not happy about any of it. But you exist now, Hana. This version of you is legally recognized, documented, embedded in multiple systems across two countries. The person you were before... that identity is gone. No records, no history, no proof of existence."

Complete erasure?

The thought arrives clinical and cold. Hana pushes it away.

"What about my old life? My family? People who knew me?"

"Reality alteration affects collective memory. People who knew you before... their memories have shifted. Filled in the gaps. You probably have a sister or parent somewhere who remembers saying goodbye when you left for Japan, maybe exchanging occasional messages since then."

"That's—"

"Horrifying. Yes." Ren meets her eyes steadily. "I know. And I'm sorry."

The apology sits between them like something dead.

"The spell," Hana says slowly. "It was supposed to make me accept this. Make me forget who I was and embrace the new identity."

"Yes."

"Why didn't it work?"

For the first time, genuine uncertainty crosses Ren's face.

"I don't know," she admits. "The others—Sora, Rei, Miya, Yuki—didn’t need that alteration. They were programed with what they needed, accepted it so they learned what they needed as they went on. But you..." She trails off, studying Hana with something like scientific curiosity. "You should have forgotten everything by now. Instead, you're getting clearer."

Resistance suggests unusual psychological structure. Or magical anomaly. More data needed.

Useful. Whatever's protecting you, protect it.

The voices again. Hana is getting tired of them.

"Fine," she says. "I can't reverse this myself. You can't reverse it, or won't. What exactly are my options?"

"Fulfill the contract. Two years as a member of Prism5. After that, you're free to go—or stay, if you choose. And during that time, I'll do everything I can to find a reversal method. That's my promise."

"Your promise." Hana tastes the words. They're bitter. "After what you've done to me."

"After what circumstance has done to you. I'm not your enemy, Hana. I'm the person trying to make an impossible situation survivable."

Hana turns away. Looks out the window at Manhattan waking up to a new year.

The smart play is cooperation. Pretend compliance while gathering intelligence. Find leverage, identify weaknesses, plan for contingencies. Two years is a long time—long enough to discover alternatives, build resources, develop escape options.

Basic survival strategy. Adapt to hostile environment.

But another part of her—the part that spent hours holding a crying stranger's hand—wonders if these people are really her enemies. They're trapped too, in their own ways. Transformed for different reasons, bound by the same contract, trying to survive the same impossible situation.

Trust no one.

They're not enemies. They're victims.

Everyone is a potential threat until proven otherwise.

The voices argue. Hana lets them. Hana files that away for later.

"The contract," she says finally. "Show it to me."