2022-07-16: Reward
- Cutscene: Reward
- Cast: Anti
- Where: Alleyway, Tsutsujidai
- Date: 2022-07-16
- Summary: After gambling and losing everything, Anti is briefly motionless.
The train rolls by. Where is it going? The connecting stations...
The train's lights illuminate the alley, bound on one side by chain-link fence, on the other by some of the cheapest housing in Tsutsujidai. Potted plants sit atop the air conditioning unit, cacti praying for sunlight; milk crates stack haphazardly by the door. The outer walls are plain, plain concrete, old posters not quite peeled from them.
A puppet is discarded here, an old doll -- a boy.
Anti lies on his side, hands curled loosely on the floor. The metal shine of the DG Cells is not inert, any more; not black, any more. The scales are manifest. It hurts.
He's slung some fabric over his eye, tied it in place to keep himself from leaking out. He can leak out. His exposed eye is shellshocked and weary with grief, disconnected, discarded, devastated. His lips can't quite bother to close. This hurts, too.
In the dead of the night, the train's lights wash over him, once and once and once again and gone. Darkness, again, and he is gone. He has laid here a day or more, a broken music player skipping over tortured concepts, skipping, skipping... silence.
No diary keeps forgotten and unwanted things.
His stomach growls.
(Distantly, distantly, he asks himself again: where is the train going?)