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Zero Kiryu "The purpose of this particular mental incursion," Zero had explained prior to settling into the machine that would enable a mind dive to begin with, "is to eliminate an aspect of myself that is strictly destructive. You may attend to other psychohazards at your discretion-- I will be able to moderate any edits that are undesirable, but you are all either friends or trusted members of the Concord so I do not anticipate problems."

"This aspect of myself will most likely be indistinguishable from my own mental avatar." He continued, "Until it makes a decision to take action. It will most probably be a difficult confrontation, so I would advise you to take it slow. And in shoring up my own mind to release him while retaining control of myself, he too will be empowered in a way."

Immediately before the mental incursion began Zero drew an odd-looking object from his pocket and consumed it.

The mental world of Zero Kiryu begins at a house in the hills. It is a large house, three stories tall but not quite so enormous that it would be called a manor. There is a long drive winding down the side of the mountain towards a distant-but-visible town, and an expansive structure occupying a mountain in the distance.

It is dreadfully cold here, and the cold seems to have no physical component. It is a memory of winter's cold intermingled with a great deal of lost blood and, so, it cannot be avoided-- though neither is it really harmful. Just uncomfortable.

A layer of snow coats the surroundings, not particularly heavy or deep but persistent. A hard and crunchy layer that has lingered is evident beneath fresh topsnow. There is a single cherry tree out in the front yard. One of the windows of the house stands ajar, a set of small footprints leading out beneath the tree. No matter how much it snows, the footprints never go away. A beautiful silver-haired woman in a white kimono with a light purple sash is laid out underneath the cherry tree. The snow there is a great bloom of blood, and though her midsection has been covered with a red blanket, if it is pulled back it becomes evident that the woman has had her heart torn out.
Aoko Aozaki     Aoko and trusted are two very odd words to use together.
    But if nothing else you could count on her to be loyal, so she was, honestly, harmless in this context.

    To Zero, anyway.
    "Hey you think we can negotiate something about that fluff?" the magus asks Priscilla, sliding closer. "That's some EX-ranked fluff if I've ever seen any, I definitely need a bit! You know, for reasons. Magical reasons." And maybe a bit of money on the side. The pile of gold Gilgamesh gave her in exchange for A Day had already worn itself out, owing to a complete lack of self control and blowing all of it into luxury hotels and meals.

    Aoko is a responsible adult.

    Once inside the snowy wonderland, Aoko immediatly dreads not having brought winter clothes. Though she wonders if that would have mattered. Seeing a woman under a lone tree, she becomes immediatly interested in the blanket, until the sight of the missing heart underneath makes her frown - while, unashamedly, using the blanket to cover herself.

    "Alright, I guess this is a murder mystery then. Miss Kuraaaaan!" she says, looking towards Yuuki. "Since he's not giving us narration, can we get some from you?"
Yuuki Kuran Aoko is not only harmless, but useful! And, prompting Yuuki with a 'miss Kuraaaaaan' gets the long brown-haired girl in a thick, puffy-necked fuzz-trimmed snow coat to snap into attention from 'dreamily staring off into the distance, breathing quietly' to actually animating.

"Oh! Aoko, right, explaining things. I'll try my best."

"So, I have no idea where we are: I've never been here. But there's a scent... Something around here..."

Yuuki points at the corpse under the blanket, whose heart was torn out. "Oh! That's it! That's... Huh, I don't remember her. Perhaps it's someone from Zero's past. The pureblood who bit him, maybe?"

She never learned that entire backstory bit enough to spot the woman by her looks alone.

"Zero's winter really is much harsher than mine... Well, that's probably a... hhhhouse, and in it we're looking for the manifestation of a sickness that's a part of him, to tear it out."

Yuuki smiles pleasantly at Aoko. "He was saving his half of the fruit for a rainy day. Giving him enough power to pull away from what we're about to carve out is the best possible option, isn't it?"
Starbound Flotilla     Moonfin's presence here is... weird? For some reason he doesn't seem like the same person that some of those present were busy fighting. His posture is all different, and even some of his /gear/ is different. Well, regardless of the matter, he's here in what seems like a formal sort of warrior getup, the same kind of durasteel samurai diving armor with a few stylish engravings and other assorted accoutrement.

    His silence hangs on the air with the kind of smugness that only a Hylotl can have before they arrive, and for a time after. It takes some time before he speaks, and what he first says is, "This shall be suited most of all to you, I see, First." It seems like a Priscilla sort of mind, after all. The chill settles into his bones, and he tries to heat up his armor to counteract it, but finds no success. Rather than let himself be seen visibly bothered by it, he just tries to pretend he doesn't feel it.

    The picturesque sight of the dead woman with her heart torn out is almost too artistic. Thankfully, there's no such thing for a Hylotl. "If we seek a monster, perhaps this trail is the one that shall find it. The source of a death so artistic would only be the result of a truly terrible monster, or something that does not at all qualify for it, there shall be no halves." He regards her with the look of both an art critic and an investigator, then checks the surroundings for more footprints. Since it seems terribly unlikely that any will be found, his alternative is to approach the window that was left ajar, see what's within, and assuming nothing deters him, elegantly flip through it.

    It's so fucking elegant that the man actually manages to clear his feet of snow before he lands. The arrogant politeness is almost superhuman.
Priscilla     Priscilla still likes snow, and the cold, and the mountains. The numbing tingle of somehow having lost a lot of blood marks a distinct sort of discomforting difference from Yuuki's fuzzy little dreamland winter, but at the same time, her sense of up and down isn't twisted all around and she doesn't feel like she's walking on the Australia of Flat Earth, so she can't especially say one is worse than the other.

    In the brainspace, she is wearing her fluffy white coat-dress. A few years of wearing fancier royal clothes isn't going to supplant that self-image in her mind. Aoko asks, and she is met with the hardest-ass "no." there is to give. Not even a middle English-ism. Just "no."

    Then she metaphorically prods Yuuki. "Am I to imagine some sort of pact? An agreement where the each of thee wouldst promise to face thine demons if the other one wouldst? I do not taketh Sir Kiryu for an imitator." i.e. what are you mental exercise buddies now? "Albeit, I hath also yet to imagine any part of him that couldst be particularly described as 'strictly destructive', unless perhaps one is to append 'self' before it. I suppose we shalt see."

    Oddly, she makes a faintly affirmative sound in slowly nodding to Moonfin, apparently agreeing with his assessment that the murder is in fact set up to look exceptionally pretty. "In mine experience, the vast majority of such art either mercy killings, or done by someone or something that so massively outclasses the victim, that it is done in such a way either out of either idle boredom, or veneration of the act itself." she says. Then she blinks. "Pardon? What fruit?" Pause. "And wouldst thou be able to inform mineself as to why the heart, specifically? Art not purebloods meant to be exceptionally powerful, and their blood in general suffice?"
Zero Kiryu The blanket feels more like a very long shawl, and it's obvious on handling it that it was stained red like everything else around it. It's light and airy, the sort of thing you'd wear on a cool-to-warm spring day. It alleviates the exterior cold, but that's not really what's so uncomfortable. The woman lying in the snow -- now blanketless -- is by any objective standard a very pretty woman, apart from the fatal injury inflicted upon her. Pale-skinned with white hair so long that it's a wonder anyone could take care of it, that woman stares up into the sky with unseeing pink eyes.

Yuuki can, at least, confirm by scent that the dead woman was a pureblood. In fact, the overall quality and 'factuality' of her scent is bizarrely on-point. It doesn't have any dreamlike qualities, or distorted memories associated with it. The reasons for this, though, are lost to the past.

It's not difficult for Moonfin to leap up to the open window. There is a wavery quality to the house, as if bits of it have been gradually forgotten. This isn't one of them, though. The room inside is a child's bedroom, and entering it brings on a strange feeling. It is obviously external-- that is, you yourself are not experiencing it exactly. It is an aspect of the memory of this place, and so unavoidable but still alien.

It is quite simply the very specific feeling of someone entering a room that ought to be filled and finding it empty. A mixture of pit-of-the-stomach wrongness and immediate alarm swims up out of the depths of one's conscious.

No blood or violence has occurred here, and the footprints themselves were certainly those of a child. It appears as if somebody snuck through the window to the cherry tree, and that this was an incredibly out-of-place thing for them to do, like getting into the car of a stranger.

True to expectations however, there is no narrator to help things along, and no helpful assistant appears either. This place, at least, is simply empty of still-living things.
Yuuki Kuran "Well..." Yuuki points at the absolutely Beautiful corpse. It's gorgeous. The framing, the way the blanket revealed her like the sweeping of a curtain away from a table's centerpiece, her poised posture, the way her heart poetically left a gaping emptiness...

Beautiful.
Yuuki twiddles her fingers, and the corpse ragdolls for a few moments before resting in...
It's Beautiful. The way her hair falls across her kimono. The way the cherry blossoms... Erm, Empty Snow falls around her features in a soft dappling.

Yuuki continues this for a few moments, putting the corpse in Increasingly Absurd postures that all end up jaw-droppingly beautiful.

"Most... purebloods get like this, especially ladies. Just, totally absurd beauty, like the world will fill the air around you with out of season perfume and flower petals because you're moving through it. If it's who I think it could be, then... They've been dead here for a long time. If she's heartless, she's not going to be coming back."

Priscilla bullying Yuuki about Self Improvement Pacts gets an 'oh-you' dismissive wave. "Nothing like that. Doing mine first was just convenient. A test of things, maybe. We had always intended to do this, somehow, whether through treatments or surgery or something: Flamel's expertise and the remaining half of the Fruit of Einnashe for power was just the most clean and garunteed to work way. Moonfin's peace, Aoko's power, Priscilla's prowess, and, well, Lifehunt and Artemis give us an edge."

"We just have to be careful, and find it. Okay?"
Aoko Aozaki     "He kept secrets even from you, huh?" Aoko responds to Yuuki, not entirely surprised. Just a bit. She'd never really nailed their relationship down besides moody guardian hyperactive princess.

    This is followed by going "Awwww," at Priscilla. Damn, now what is she supposed to use next time she needs to make a familiar? That fluff would've been perfect.

    Back to Yuuki: "That's pretty clever, though. I guess the hunger didn't bother him as much as whatever this is does, so it's a smart play."

    As for the fruit, Aoko briefly explains: "Oh, it's a long story, but basically there was a vampire forest in my world and I let those two loose in it to kill it. Turns out, all the blood it harvested from killing people, it gathered up in a single fruit. Eating it would let a vampire ignore their bloodthirst forever! I don't know about eating half of it though." She glances at Yuuki. "How's that been holding up? Still in effect?"

    Half of forever might still be a pretty long time.

    With the fancy bloodstained shawl worn and her body very slightly warmer, Aoko turns back to Yuuki as she explains purebloods, and then looks back at the dead woman. "I guess I can see it. I don't know about beauty, but I'm used to vampires having Mystic Eyes at the very least. Usually they can charm people, not always though."

    She looks around, to see if the footprints might not continue past here, or if the house and the tree are really the only landmarks. "You think whoever did this is in the house, or is that too easy?"
Priscilla     "Lady Kuran." Priscilla begins insisting, repeatedly, with gradually greater volume. "Lady Kuran. A corpse shouldst be left well enough alone." she says, despite Yuuki's artistic flair for incredibly pretty shoujo ladies and framing involving snow and cherry trees. "Asides, wouldst one normally 'come back' with a heart in place? Most things live not especially long with theirs wrenched free." she says.

    "There art no adult individuals who hath at least one secret that they share with no one." Priscilla waves off Aoko. "To do otherwise requires severe mental damage, or a complete lack of depth of self; to becometh a blank and transparent plane which contains nothing and thus hides nothing." The talk of a vampire forest seems to be mildly intriguing, for the brief while she stops to stare at the tree and contemplate it. "Convenient." she eventually decides on for her take. "If they art nowhere about the house, which is quite likely, there art only two other meaningful points to find them. It is not as if they couldst escape very far, within the confines of Sir Kiryu's own mind."

    "I doubt that the house hath nothing to do with it, however." Priscilla eventually concludes, after one of those hanging pauses that isn't *quite* long enough to get to where it feels like someone else's turn. With Moonfin in the kids' room, Priscilla actually just circles around to the front door, and simply forces it if given a key prompt, going in the normal way and exploring the first floor, pressing X on things and rolling her search and awareness scores.
Starbound Flotilla     Something should be here. That's what Moonfin thinks, anyway. Someone snuck out to go to the tree, but if he couldn't find more footprints himself, then he'll need to investigate the house, or at the very least find a hint here about whether to visit the far-off mountain structure or the town down the drive. What kind of child was here? Perhaps the kind Moonfin might expect that Zero was?

    No, no. He listens to the feeling of alarm. He's one of the only members of the Flotilla capable of actually paying attention to his own emotions, after all. Wasn't it more like someone Zero was worried about losing? He heads in, to specifically search out signs of what location to pursue. Town, or mountain? Is the missing one more inclined to visit the mundane thoughts of a bustling town, or visit the core consciousness of the mountain complex?

    "I can find none within this place. It speaks of an absence most of all." He says, in a tone of worry. "Which means that our efforts are already focused on locating. We need to find where the aspect may have gone, if it was ever here, or where it may be intending to target, if it was not."
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki is chided for arranging a body into beautiful positions.
There are no NOT-beautiful position this body can be in, even truly undignified ones. But she isn't having fun, and her point is made, and it's rude, so, she stops when her point is made.

"I don't smell anything too out of the ordinary, nor do I know this place. The terrible feeling of hunger in the very air, though - that would be Zero. The Fruit of Einnashe removed my cravings, but not my desires, if that makes sense? I don't deny myself as much as I used to, but I don't think I have a 'satisfied', or a 'full'. I could drink down an entire ocean and still have room for more."

Following priscilla in the house, Yuuki sighs softly, still smiling at Aoko conversationally. "It made my life easier, though I know Zero kept it as a secret weapon. I couldn't eat the whole thing... It would have been too selfish."

At Moonfin's insistence that there is nobody here, Yuuki taps her chin. "Maybe we need to find Ichiru? It's Zero's brother. They..."

Yuuki trails off. "... Well, he should be in here somewhere. Even if Zero isn't being helpful."
Zero Kiryu There are more sets of footprints, but they don't seem to correspond to the original set coming down from the window. An adult's footprints lead away from the front door down the drive and into the distance, with a lone child's footprints trailing to his left.

The front door is partway open, but not so much that what's inside is plainly visible without approaching closer. An angled view offers a foyer and sitting room scattered with debris, and the edge of a sword lying on the floor.

The overall landmarks are relatively straightforward. The house itself, and the tree yes, but the town in the distance is very clear and distinct. The road leading to it less so. It appears as if the 'inbetween' isn't actually important enough for any sort of clarity. What is a little odd is that there's no sign of a vehicle having been used to come or leave here, even though the distant town is a good clip out.

Beyond the town, up in the hills, is a walled compound with three especially distinct buildings and a number of smaller satellite buildings that are harder to make out. This place, too, is very distinct among the surrounding hills and mountains.

Opening the front door and proceeding through reveals a memory that has been split in two. The separate memories are transposed across one another, so that one can view both simultaneously and must focus on one 'side' or the other to get a clear view of them untainted by the reality of a singular perspective.

The interior of the house is too vivid to be real, though perhaps not so dramatically so as it usually is in the minds of others. It has the quality of a child experiencing the worst day of their life, and though that gravity is normally quite small, in this case it's hard to blame the subject.

In one of the memories the foyer is a recent battleground. Shelves and furniture are overturned and spilled across the floor, and a couple lie dead not far from one another. The woman has dirty blonde hair, and lies face down on the ground. The exact wound that did her in is ambiguous -- it looks like Zero didn't actually get a look at it. There's quite a lot of blood around, but superficially the woman is just dead.

She has violet eyes, if inspected that closely.

The man is the very image of the adult Zero Kiryu. A chinese broadsword sits near him, and a garrote wire near the woman.

The second interior, which has begun to overtake the murder scene, is a house that has been cleaned up. Phantasmal patches of blood splash the floors and walls like watercolor paints, still present but their influence having faded.

The smell of vegetable stew fills the house on both sides.

In the older memory, most segments of the house have dimmed. How they were back then, forgotten-- perhaps simply unimportant. In the newer memory there is an untidiness to it all-- dusty and unkempt, with the first signs that someone has swept through and begun cleaning.

There is a staircase that leads up, but none of the rooms besides the one Moonfin explored is distinct.

There is a staircase that leads up. A trunk is situated next to it. The contents of each room, sans furniture, is in the process of being catalogued and boxed.
Aoko Aozaki     Aoko, shamelessly wearing the bloodied shawl of a corpse, follows after Yuuki and Priscilla when they opt to see the house, after noting, "Oh, there's more footprints. They're going away. I guess we have our next heading if that house is no good." Just need not to forget. Easy.

    She enters the house through the front door, aside Yuuki and behind Priscilla, musing loudly: "Yeah, it makes sense. Glad it helped! It's not like I had any use for the fruit. Immortality, psht. Like I can't get that easier ways if I want."

    Like time travel!
    Wait, pretend she didn't think that.

    Experiencing those memories is a bit of a surprise, and once the wonderment fades off, Aoko looks at Yuuki for answers.

    "Was that him, or his dad?" You can never be sure.
    "Either way, if this is the kind of mess he grew up in, no wonder he has demons to cut out. I probably would, too!" Well, alright, her childhood was turbulent, but it didn't turn into a series of sitcom murders and shonen battles until the end of highschool.

    Zero looks to have had it rough since much before that.

    At the sight of the trunk, Aoko gains the sudden ability to be useful, in the form of trying to open it and search it for treasure. Is it rude to loot people's minds?

    She's unconcerned by the prospect.
Priscilla     "I wouldst imagine his father." Priscilla says to Aoko, with a tone more grim than the usual, fairly shallow range of expressing bad feelings that she has. "The latter memory indicates that the first didst transpire some great time ago, where the feeling is very much that Sir Kiryu was still far too young. Asides. It may be a mere guess, but I expecteth such corpses to be long too cold for a vampire to resurrect, if they wished."

    She slowly turns her head to look up the stairs, both across the fading bloodstains, and the packed boxes. "It is a wonder that, at some point, he didst returneth to this place at all. It takes a great deal of courage to not simply face these sorts of memories again, but to move past them, and maketh something of thine own of their space." When Aoko goes past, she reaches out and yoinks the shawl off Aoko, going out to the driveway to quickly check whether the footsteps lead to the town or to the mountain beyond.
Starbound Flotilla     Moonfin examines the many rooms, but finds none distinct. This house is seemingly defined by what was here. Or rather, by what was, suddenly, not here. "They left." He says, regarding the trunk. "This place is defined by absence. Of what was not here, and of leaving it behind." He steps out. "If this is his childhood home, then we must follow the path of his life. Through this, perhaps, we will find the man himself, and the aspect that he so sorely wishes to be rid of."

    He examines the drive. This... led to the town, didn't it? Something like that? It's certainly closer than the mountain. "Unless we can find more hints here, our most fruitful path, I think, shall be the town. It seems the nearer memory, and perhaps shall be a stop on the way to the next locale. It shall likely offer greater context, or if not, at least more evidence from more victims."

    Unless things seem totally mis-arranged, he's going to see about heading to the town. Not that he'd be unwilling to hike, but he finds it quite unlikely that such an indistinct road will be especially long.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki seems genuinely unmoved by most of the proceedings, the blood on the walls, the pungency of memory and the bite of cold desperation.

She crouches by the murder scene, touching her fingers to the blood pooled around the woman with the garrote, and then touches the garrote with the tip of her finger, experiencing a mild electric shock that leaps from the grips of the weapon to discourage her hand from seizing it.

"Ah. Yes, his mother. The smell, and the weapon."

She doesn't go for the other weapon - the chinese broadsword - and instead stands, licking off her fingers as if she had syrup from a doughnut on her digits. "This must be the Kiryu house. I've never been here. Zero and I met... at Kaien Cross'."

She points down the Unobserved Path to the town beneath, and the manor-school up in the distance. "Down there. Though... I don't remember his parent's house being so close to the city that Cross Academy sat above. I guess this is the memory of things. The progression?"

The 'current' memory, without the bodies and the scent of vegetable stew, leads Yuuki to a pensive drifitng from one foot to another, eyes closed as she tilts left and right. "Ahh... That's his cooking, too. I guess he went back, recently."

Moonfin presses on, and Yuuki is at the fish-man's heels. "I know how this story ends, but not any of the other pages. It's like a diary I read backwards."
Zero Kiryu The trunk opens without any difficulty whatsoever. The contents are... incredibly mundane, actually. It looks like somebody who lives a relatively modest life packed up everything they owned in the thing. Clothes are folded haphazardly at the bottom with fragile things wedged between layers of them in order to protect them from damage. There's not much of either, though-- the trunk's owner carried few photographs, and fewer still in fragile frames.

A bell on the end of a ribbon lies on the top of the pile. A few paper packets of thick tablets, what looks like old school books -- which Yuuki can identify if she pleases -- along with a few other things.

A small revolver intended for someone much smaller than Zero has been thrust down the left side of the pile of possessions, and can be withdrawn relatively easily. It has a feeling of being 'alive', and sparks dance from its surface if it is taken from the pile, briefly 'attacking' whoever grabs it before appearing to cede to their ownership. That, too, is familiar to Yuuki.

    * YOU GOT: 1x Memory of a Hunter Weapon.
        * That may or may not have been involved in a suicide pact.

When Priscilla begins to follow the footsteps that trail down the drive onto the road beyond, she finds that the surroundings begin to fade entirely. A horrible lethargy begins to set in, not one of bodily movement but one of personal focus. What happened between 'here' and 'there' is so out of focus that it simply does not exist, and so cannot be conveyed. The sense of where and who settles in neatly however.

As soon as the lethargy of focus settles in, Priscilla senses a figure at her side. It isn't hostile, though-- it doesn't react to her. The man is sketchy in appearance, and regardless of who observes him he is taller than they are. Kaien Cross has ash blonde hair and hazel eyes. A charcoal winter longcoat is buttoned up securely, a white scarf secured at his neck. Though he is sketchy in appearance -- literally, not figuratively -- it's hard to interpret his demeanor as anything other than kind and gentle. He just has that sort of face.

Measured objectively, if someone should take the time to do so, the man is a little over six feet tall.

But, no matter how objectively you compare to him, he is always taller. This memory is that of a child, and this man is a giant by comparison.

Out in the distance, beyond the fog, is a house. The house stands upon sprawling grounds, surrounded by high walls and gates. The shores of a lake come up to the rear of the house, and one other building is visible just down the way.

In the distance, two bridges can be seen crossing another -- separate -- lake, that form a V and feed into the main campus.

Attempts to walk -- or for that matter, fly, or otherwise directly navigate to town yields the exact same experience. It appears impossible to get from the house in the hills to the town directly. But there is a sense of nearing it.
Zero Kiryu Each step taken towards the new house bleeds away the sense of cold, like stepping out of freezing weather into a room lit by a roaring hearth. The sketchy, foggy perception of the surroundings lifts, but the subjective perspective of things distorts further so that you always feel closer to the ground than you naturally are.

For a few fleeting seconds a figure in the doorway is as washed out and indistinct as everything else, but eventually this too comes into clear focus. Yuuki Kuran stands in the doorway, somewhere between ten and twelve years old. After a moment she is the most vivid thing present in the surroundings. There is a look of concern on her face.

Like a cartoon made of sketches thumbed through manually, she appears to say something, but no sound comes.

At this moment the forced perspective eases, a gentle weight lifting from each of your minds. It is implicitly clear that there is more freedom to roam from here.

A thought of, 'Where is Town from here?' yields the answer: Through the main gate, down the road.

The CROSS RESIDENCE, CROSS ACADEMY, and the ONLY TOWN are open for exploration.