Left-Behind Trace [Open]

[standalonehuman]

WHO: Togusa and people!
WHERE: The hospital, oops.
WHEN: January 7th and onwards.
WHAT: Togusa got shot, he's in the hospital, and finally knows how his Other got shot.
WARNINGS: Discussion of violence, medical treatment, and the like.

The news probably didn't take long to reach a lot of people. Togusa got brought to the hospital with a gunshot wound. Togusa's official story is that he got shot stopping an opportunistic mugger trying to steal things in the chaos of the fire. So what actually happened?

Comments

[thesettingsun]

"Well I'm glad it was fun apart from the little incident of you getting shot and ending up hospitalized."

That sounds a little more sardonic than Shuji intended, but it's fine. This is fine.

[standalonehuman]

Togusa sighs and he leans back into the propped-up bed. "Maybe fun isn't the right word. I wish I knew what it had been for."

"I ended up in there, because I saw the dog. German shepherd, so I thought it was a K-9 that had wandered off? But he was really smart. Like he knew what we were there for, so once Malik showed up, he led us along."

[thesettingsun]

Sorry, Togusa, Shuji's too much of a worrier to see any good in anything even remotely associated with his friends getting hurt.

"There was a dog behind my door, but a shiba inu. We'd have gotten lost without it, I'm pretty sure."

[standalonehuman]

"Really?" That gets Togusa sitting up a little more again. "Oh, now I really want to know what's up with the dogs. Bundle up all the wet food and treats for them."

"Lost wasn't a problem for us. There was really only one path to go on. Imagine a futuristic city, but one that something bad happened to. Like it was on the edge of collapsing. The bridge to take us there kept on breaking."

[thesettingsun]

"That's definitely more interesting than Taints hanging around outside a coffee shop."

...or possibly not, depending on your standards.

[standalonehuman]

"Wait, a coffee shop? What was so important about a coffee shop?" Togusa shifts so he can see Shuji even better.

"They come out of works of art, right?"

[thesettingsun]

"Literature specifically, as far as I know." Maybe other spirits were jumping into paintings and that just wasn't Dazai's job. "And come out of isn't really the right term. More like they're inside them devouring the stories and we had to go in to stop them."

"...But yeah, a coffee shop. With a rivalry with the neighboring tea house."

[standalonehuman]

"Oh. No, I get that. That makes some sense. Maybe what I saw in Koutarou's dream wasn't quite true-to-life."

Togusa barks out a single laugh, then cringes, but he keeps a smile on his face again. "A rivalry? Okay, I need to know everything, this is too good."

[thesettingsun]

Please don't hurt yourself laughing, Togusa, Shuji will worry himself sick.

"I don't have a lot of the plot, unfortunately, but it seemed to be set around the time when coffee was just becoming a thing in Japan? So there was a lot of struggle to compete and just establish itself well enough to survive financially."

Shuji is filling in some blanks himself here, but he's a good enough writer to fill those in.

[standalonehuman]

Mm. Togusa will gladly snuggle in more. Tell him a story, Uncle Shuji.

"It's so weird to think about, because coffee is such a staple for Japanese salarymen now. But yeah, at the right time that had to be hard."

He thinks he's getting a better visual of the scene, when he has a time period on it. "So why were Taints getting drawn to the place?"

[thesettingsun]

Storytelling is one of Shuji's few (or so he'd say) skills.

"The weirdest part was, the Taints were never inside the shops. Always out on the street, and they'd attack me and Lina but not the normal residents of the book. Maybe they saw us as intruders? Or as a threat, or both."

[standalonehuman]

Togusa's eyebrows raise in interest. "Oh wow. They could tell the difference. Is that how they normally work, when they go in a book?"

"That is really strange compared to what we're seeing out here. That you have to be looking at it from the outside to notice it." Yikes.

[thesettingsun]

"The books here don't have Taints in them, thankfully, so I'm not completely sure. But I think they just leave the regular people in the books alone."

Talking about Taints is weird, in large part because even Dazai didn't seem to know all that much, and Shuji knows even less.

"...Of course, if they completely devoured a book I can't imagine anything good would happen to its residents, so maybe they're just being efficient?"

[standalonehuman]

"Even if they aren't directly attacking, their presence is still devouring the book. What happens to," he raises a hand and waves it back and forth, searching for a word. "The book? No, what happens to the story, if they eat it all?"

There's a difference. One copy of a book, but the inherent unconscious concept of the story that it holds is bigger.

[thesettingsun]

"It's gone. Everyone who knew the story forgets it. I don't have a specific answer to what happens to it on the internet but I imagine it's the same as its copies in books - gone forever."

This is why it's so pressing to hold back the Taints even when no method to destroy them permanently has been found.

[standalonehuman]

Togusa's eyes go wide. This is literally the worst thing he can possibly imagine, worse than anything he's seen from Togusa's world. Wiping out whole stories is a level of evil that he can't even wrap his brain around.

"You guys are doing good, then. The greatest good. That's incredible. Everything we're doing is so small time compared to that."

[thesettingsun]

Shuji reaches over and very, very gently baps Togusa on the forehead. Stop that.

"It's not a competition. I'm not going to let you ignore your own achievements, especially after you've gotten hurt in the line of duty. Saving even one person's life is never small time."

Stories may outlive individual people, but the effect a person can have on the world will never truly disappear.

[standalonehuman]

Togusa blinks, dumbfounded, at the bap. He reaches up and scratches at where Shuji touched him. "Okay. Okay," he smiles.

"Stories are really important, though!" He will stick to this point. "Losing the whole impact that a story has had on people, all the inspiration, that's big!"

[thesettingsun]

"And if you had the choice between saving a story and saving a person, would you hesitate?"

Shuji certainly wouldn't, and he doubts Togusa would either. There isn't even a reason to state which he would choose.

"People have as much influence on other people as stories do. If not way more."

[standalonehuman]

"No." Togusa even lets out a light chuckle, because the answer is so obvious.

"Let's agree that both jobs are important, then. Because I wouldn't be able to stop a threat like that. Neither would my other guy."

[thesettingsun]

"Most living people can't go inside books. That's why you should leave that up to me and Koutarou."

Or at least, Koutarou when he had access to that kind of power.

"And I'd make a terrible policeman. So Recolle needs both of us."

[standalonehuman]

Togusa can't help it, it gets a smile out of him. "Personally, I think you'd make a good policeman. You care. But okay. We need both jobs, really."

Togusa shifts and sits up more, getting more animated as the conversation goes on. "So where to from here? We both found those doors and found our way out. But do we know what it did?"

[thesettingsun]

Please don't get so animated you hurt yourself, Togusa.

"If you keep opening doors, maybe you'll find the door that goes to the right place... But there's a lot of doors, you could keep going through them for ages and not make any progress. ...Anyway, having a key for a lock behind another lock needing another key is really annoying."

Somewhere, a murdergame mastermind just sneezed.

[standalonehuman]

Togusa reaches up and scratches his head. "I really miss Yoon-sung. Really really miss him. For a lot of reasons, don't get me wrong. But sometimes when this whole thing feels like a game, he'd have the best advice." He shrugs with his arms out to the sides. "And it would just work."

"Even opening any door, if all I did was cross one out, then. Okay, it helped."

[thesettingsun]

"But nobody takes me seriously when I talk about narrative casualty..."

Shuji's only griping a little, not seriously.