intro

[pinkprismstaff]

You don't remember getting knocked out.

That's the best descriptor for the feeling you experience before you wake up. There's a glittering absence of color to your field of vision, and a sensation that you aren't yourself, you aren't anything in particular. Abruptly, unpleasantly, you wake up in a strange, sunny location. Where that is might vary--laying in a sun chair on the pool deck, draped over the skee-ball machine in the arcade, face down in a cart in the laundry room....or just stretched out in the long, long expanse of sand surrounding the island.

There doesn't seem to be anyone else here, aside from the others who have woken up and have as little clue where they might be as you do. It's a silent, empty island filled with a lot of questions and few clear answers. What you can conclude are a few things: that you don't get hungry or tired, that any wounds you have don't seem to either heal or worsen, and leaving the island doesn't seem to be possible.

Maybe it would be good to meet with the others who have woken up?

Comments

[photoning]

[Mahiru grins widely. She almost wants to hide her mouth with her hand. The idea of an alien (in whatever sense) only recognizing this model as a film camera, like a cliché from a cartoon, is just too cute.]

I wish I could let myself use film. This just uses a digital memory card. But look, you can browse them straight away with the little wheel.

[It's chunky! Touchscreens haven't totally annihilated haptic buttons yet!]

[birdysnatcher]

Oh.

[She sounds disappointed. But still, she'll browse past her candid and see...what has Mahiru got in here?]

[photoning]

[Mahiru insisted on just showing Minato with the wheel under her own thumb. Her guard is always lower around girls. She realizes something a little too late.]

Oh, I'd actually been having a pretty big party with my friends before this happened. I haven't been able to format my memory card yet today. [She's referring to the process of a setting simple enough to implement on a camera: Pressing "format" sends the latest batch of photos to an automatically generated folder. So a memory card would usually contain folders from multiple previous days, and then a new set of photos that are the only ones available to browse within the camera.] Hope I don't run out of space in this situation, haha.

[Please read the room... There are about 25 photos taken here in the hotel. One of Baldr is rather fetching TBH! Maybe a few others will show up over time but so far it was mostly cataloguing the rooms and grounds (not too much of the forest that she heard about secondhand). The camera's internal date is apparently February 2015. Then there are about 100 previous unformatted photos. At first, they show several other young adults on a cruise ship, eating kebabs. So there's no need to go back to the beginning and verify that this is all they show. Right?]

[birdysnatcher]

[Shade scrolls by a little too quickly to appreciate the artistry, perhaps - but she just wants to get past all the room cataloguing. The date flags her of no significance; she hasn’t even kept up with what Earth Year it is. She keeps going until she reaches the group photo.]

Who are they?

[photoning]

We're classmates.

[Great opportunity to take the camera back and start pointing them out.]

Hiyoko-chan is a traditional dancer... Ibuki-chan is a musician... Mikan-chan is a nurse...

[She hesitates a significant moment trying to decide how to describe it.]

A lot of stuff happened right after we graduated. Not everyone had a place they wanted to stay. So we've been hanging out together for a while.

[birdysnatcher]

Classmates?

[Like…high school? Shade makes a noise of confusion.]

But you all seem to get along.

[photoning]

[It is... so funny how inherently implausible this story is. Mahiru should find a way not to linger on it much longer.]

We've definitely had our fair share of fights in our time. But it was a special program at a private school. We did almost everything together.

...maybe I should go look for them...

[birdysnatcher]

[Listen, she has a special alien coat and even she thinks getting along with your school friends is absurd.

Hearing that they get along despite it all…it makes Shade a little sad. To see something so out of reach. She nods to Mahiru.]

They’re probably looking for you.