Private - Oratorio Tangram | Page 2

Though he had some sound reasoning to share, she felt a little uneasy from it. His thought process was interesting, but if she thought too hard on it, she might just study him until she could build a character out of that alone- and it wasn't this kind of thought that made a character by itself. His mention of his own reasons and the categories he used in the game caught her attention the most.

"If I may ask, what are those two categories? I tend to go by such things as well...It's a very black and white world in my eyes, many times, you see."

Her guts twisted at the thought of someone treating money as if it a commodity. She shook her head, raising her palm up to wipe her brow that dripped an anxious sweat of its own making. "While I appreciate your reasoning, and I believe a person can surely be an investment, you should still think more about how you use your money and who you choose to invest in. You may be well to do for the moment, but life can bring hard times to anyone...And for that matter, when we die in this world, it does bring grand repercussions that cost quite a bit to remove. So please, keep some mind on your savings. It's a mitzvah to be charitable, but you never know when you may need them."

The hand at her forehead moved to her lips, covering her mouth as she laughed ever so slightly. How long had it been since she used such a term, one that only those of a certain faith could dare try to fathom in language? Well, hopefully context clues would help him. He seemed an avid reader based on his quotes and cultured mentions, so he likely had some experience having to use the rest of a statement to understand, didn't he?

"While memories do hope to bleed into your entire being, to know a name is to feel closer. To quote Shakespeare, 'would a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?' Would you feel similarly about our bond if I were to call you 'stranger' instead of 'mister', to call you 'beloved' or 'enemy'? To me...I take great pride in my name, both in this world and the other."

With a deep breathe and a sip of the drink near her, she began to ramble once more. "I take pride in the names I choose for my characters, and in knowing the names of friends. A name itself is a poem. They have meanings, as all words do, whether they're from our ancestral past to what our parents wished for our futures."

For a moment, she had to look back at some of the things she'd said up until now, wanting to imagine what the perfect name for a man such as this might be. But, the further back in her memory she looked, she began to realize something.

"Now that I think about it...I did hear your name. It wasn't from you directly, but I must have to have called out to you wit it in the beginning of our meeting..." Mind wandering a bit longer, she tried to place what 'Yuichi' might mean. "As I've always been fascinated wit names, I've researched the meaning of a great many. If I recall correctly...Yuichi is a name that in Japanese generally uses the kanji that translate to 'friendly first son', with Yu being 'friendly' and 'ichi' being one. But in that matter, it could also just mean 'friendly one', if we change the context out of the 'one' slightly...And either way, implies hopes that the person would be a vibrant, friendly person with a good heart. In history, it's been used a lot by parents that wished their child would be energetic, happy, and with many good friends. Is that not a wonderful name? Thus why I am honored to know it. It would feel even friendlier if I'd learned it from you, but...We can't have everything how we wish. If life were perfect, we'd never be playing such a game, no?"

 

A brief guffaw broke Yuichi’s easygoing mien, somewhat amused that it was only now that the Faerin had remembered mentioning his name when she called him out from before during his practice session. He had wondered how long he would have had to tease the elfin by withholding his screen name when she already mentioned it before to call him out, but then again, it was not much of a problem for her since she could have used Inspect on him to learn his handle without going through his gauntlet of tricks. It showed that, maybe, she was serious about wanting to get to know him better, but the fighter did not think about it all that much. From his point of view, she was just someone whom he would soon forget; his focus lay only on one person and one person alone – Conrad Carlson, the man who took away his purpose and hurt him in ways even Takeo himself could not understand.

Just when he was about to share another quip to the purple-haired girl, she mentioned something which unintentionally dug deep into his chest as if a wooden steak had been pounded into his heart. She analyzed his handle and what it meant in the Japanese writing system, mentioning of how it pertained to the hope that someone so named would grow up to reflect his namesake.

The Japanese CEO could only be amused and amazed at the same time since he did not expect to meet someone who had working knowledge of his own country’s writing system. Still, she was slightly wrong on certain parts – ‘Yuichi Ichinose’ was the name Takeo gave to his avatar in hopes of becoming something of his virtual counterpart; and second, depending on the kanji used, there is no one name that attributes to ‘Yuichi’. Since Takeo used a Romanized spelling of the name, it could pertain to all meanings behind his handle which he could use as he saw fit.

“An astute observation, ma’am,” he praised before dropping his near-natural English-speaking tone to revert back to his usual Japanese accent, his syllables noticeably thicker in pronouncing vowels than usual. “私はあなたの知識に感心しています。(I am impressed by your knowledge, ma’am.)” he said, genuinely smiling slightly since he was caught by surprise by that hidden facet of the girl.

It was a rare opportunity to meet a foreigner who had that much depth in understanding of his own country’s culture when most others would just ignore the cultural diversity of Japan and focus mainly on a single part of the same – the one known as ‘anime’. Being taught to revere his own heritage, Takeo was disgusted by the amount of people, especially the foreign ones, who revered his country through a single medium that hardly encompassed the sheer depth of his people’s heritage. Hence, he was pleasantly surprised to meet someone like the Faerin outside boardroom interpreters who assisted his company’s American clients whenever they would meet to discuss terms and conditions. Takeo loved to return the favor by speaking in fluent English – accent and all – which would undoubtedly surprise the other party enough to facilitate candidness.

Satisfied that he had sufficiently surprised the other player with his revelation, Yuichi returned to his normal English-speaking tone to address the other points she had raised. “A game this is, that is true, but if a perfect world were to exists, would you not think that it would be a boring world?” he asked in rhetoric, taking another swig of butterbeer to wet his virtual lips for the coming tirade.

“A perfect world may be ideal for some, but I would probably rot in it. If it were a perfect world where everyone got along, we would still be living in caves or living in mud huts while eating berries and plants. Fear pushed people to excel, oppression led to innovation, and hardship gave birth to strength of character. Think about it – three hundred years of peace, love, and brotherhood in Switzerland produced Swiss chocolate and the cuckoo clock; and on the other hand, in Italy, ten years of bloody rule under the Borgias produced Da Vinci, the Renaissance, and other world-changing innovations and discoveries—”

Yuichi cut his speech short to give the Faerin a sharp look and a wicked smirk, almost as if he was confident of the truth of his own words. In fact, he was, in all candidness, for it was his own painful childhood of filled with merciless bullying and ostracization which built him from the ground-up to become an incredibly successful businessman worthy of becoming his father’s medical instrument manufacturing company.

“—and thus, I ask you again, ma’am,” he continued, “is a perfect world really desirable? Especially when it is because our world we now enjoy is built upon the struggles and sacrifices of our ancestors? Strife is justice, my dear – that is what I believe in. That is how it has been, and how it will be; the question is, which side of the scope are you going to be? The sheep who fear strife and live under the whims of an unpredictable fate? Or the wolves, who thrive in chaos?”

Unbeknown to Yuichi, his eyes had become murderously intense since, without meaning to, his entire speech subconsciously stirred his deep resentment against his intended target; the wolf who had ‘devoured’ his friend. “I was a sheep once, in this game, at least; now I know what I need to be. This world is filled with only two kinds of people, and I—”

The fighter bit his tongue and pulled himself back upon realizing that personality change he had undergone through sheer rage. He struggled to put up another façade as smooth as the one before, but it was obvious that it had now cracked, leaving the elfin girl to stare at that small slit which hid a deeper darkness that knew no bounds.

Still, Yuichi tried.

“♪♫~Sweet flow the strains, that strike my feasted ear;
Angels might stoop from Heav'n to hear
The comely song we sing,
To Israel's Lord and King.
But pause awhile: due obsequies prepare
To those who bravely fell in war.
To Eleazar special tribute pay;
Through slaughter'd troops he cut his way
To the distinguish'd elephant, and, whelm'd beneath
The stabbed monster, triumph'd in a glorious death.~♪♫”​

 

When the man opted to bemuse the impression she'd made, she found it strange he'd noted her observation and knowledge so much in one short burst of time, as if he was being purposely redundant. "Um, you don't have to say it so much. Just once is enough, sir." The girl was unaware that he'd ever spoken a second language due to the game's automatic translation. To her, his words were the same as any other he'd said so far, even if his accent had thickened a bit.

"While I would probably tire of 'perfect' quickly, 'better' isn't a bad thing, and we can always make the world better, right? I'd still prefer a world without war or disease, but that's just wishful thinking...and as you said, it's those things that really bring us further as a society. But...To me, there are things society has ruined more than it has helped with 'progress'. But similarly, the bad parts of life help bring people closer together. So I guess a balance is what is really something to seek."

Though there was a plethora more to say, there was something about his expression that caught her attention. The smoldering intensity of his gaze intimidated her, the talk of sheep and wolves being much less scary than the murder his eyes seemed to spell. When he tried his hardest to hide the break in character, she smiled sadly, aware he wanted to avoid the thoughts in his mind- she knew that look, after all. The look of a crack being seen in the porcelain of one's skin, yet the eyes and mind trying desperately to ignore the opening.

As he sung to her in hopes of changing the conversation's tune, the girl mildly sipped at her drink once more before reciting a poem in reaction. While he had quoted something somewhat dark, the poem she chose still involved opposing factors, and it felt a bit dearer to her in it's own way, staying stuck in mind. She recited the poem to a tune, a sad smile upon her lips.

"♪♫ I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference~ ♪♫”
​

Feeling a bit warmed at the memory of the poem she'd taken a verse from, she explained her reasoning with equal care. "The sheep take one path, the wolves another. The road traveled more or less isn't what matters, but the road one travels in and of itself, and what happens on that road, very much is."

 

The Faerin’s words made Yuichi stop for a while, unintentionally feeling the gravity of his actions in those few lines. She did not need to say any more than she already did; the young man’s blank stare was already enough of an indication to the inner turmoil he was forced to relive with those seemingly innocent words. The girl’s words resonated again, this time in a more accusatory tone, or as the young man felt it; the sweet words fading into a bitter imputation of the monster that he had become, and of the blood that stained his hands in pursuit of a path he had not wanted to take. A victim of circumstance he might have been before, but since then the fighter had made the sin his own – evil for evil; blood for blood. That was the corpse-hewn path to Hell he had chosen in this virtual world.

“Yes, the actions do matter, ma’am,” he spoke, the trembling tone in his voice now silenced by the weight of his sins. Cold eyes glanced over the meal and at the radiant image of the elfin girl, her flawless beauty unmarred by any kind of imperfection of any kind. She was a beautiful sight; an angel clothed as a virtual construct, just as how its creator wanted it to be. The elfin might have been a good person in real life, or she might have been a damaged one – none of that mattered to Yuichi since she was the one who forced him to realize the thing he was becoming. He smiled sincerely, but it was one filled with melancholy. “Let me tell you a story, my dear girl; I only hope you are not the squeamish kind since this will involve quite a lot of details someone as sweet as you might find unsavory—”

Days Before…

The austere living room of the abandoned house on the outskirts of Falderen had seen more than its fair share of pain, torture, and suffering. Its once pristine white walls made out of thick concrete were covered with cracks, mildew, and various scratches made by a myriad of things from knives, metal pipes, and even to human fingernails. Brownish stains from coagulated blood, possibly belonging to past detainees who were brought into the dismal chamber for Yuichi’s personal brand of questioning, replaced the once spotless floor and turned itself into a natural brown color. The windows were boarded up and only one door could be used to go in and out, with the sole source of light coming from a simple hanging gas lamp that looked so old that it would not be far-off to assume that it would fall off its hinges sooner rather than later.

In this place of absolute hopelessness, Yuichi’s figure could be seen slightly with the help of the old lamp’s dim luminescence. He sat on the floor at the left-hand corner of the makeshift interrogation room nearest to the door, bare-chested except for his running pants, tending to his hands which had been wet by blood spurts that, by the clear lack of evidence from his pristine visage, was not his own. More clearly seen than his body would be the rusted knife and various body parts sitting on top of a small table where the young man tended to himself while humming Antonio Vivaldi’s Spring – a song that was completely contrary to the dismal surroundings where the masterpiece of classic music was being played in.

“I really like classical music, Mr. McMillan,” said Yuichi in his an eerily calm and composed tone of voice. “Do you like classical music too? One of my favorites would be Vivaldi hands down. I love his work; I love his melodies. It really soothes the soul, even in times of great stress, do you not agree?” asked the youth with a sly smirk.

The man he was addressing sat a few feet away from the young man, directly under the dim yellow light of the old lamp with his hands tied securely to the hardwood chair he had been sitting on for who knows how long. Such a tight-lipped nature was only natural; the NPC was 57-year old Tristan McMillan was as battle-hardened as any former veteran of the many battles once fought all over the kingdom, most notably of several campaigns that resulted in the very successful purging of rebel elements during his tenure as a vice-captain in the imperial army. This used to be his bread and butter, and it was not surprising that he would be resistant to its effects.

Yuichi himself had already lost count of how many hours he had spent trying to get the NPC to talk, as the number of dried spatters of blood on the floor around him clearly showed. It was to be expected from one of Conrad Carlson’s lackeys. After all, it was to be expected a man who would easily give in to his desires and numb to the consequences of his acts to pick hard, unfeeling, and unbreakable men when choosing wards for his amassed wealth. More unfortunately, he was not just dealing with any manservant to Conrad Carlson’s newfound virtual wealth, but the head and caretaker of one of his provincial estates in charge of the fiend’s assets in Pormont. The only silver lining was that Yuichi was no longer the fumbling TerraSphere neophyte he was before and now knew just how to handle deadlocks like this.

As impressive as Carlson’s power flourished, it was not just the unpunished rapist who had spent all that time improving himself and his social status. For his part, the brown-haired martial artist had likewise feverishly worked himself into a force to be reckoned with, capable of enacting the revenge he obsessively sought for the despair and humiliation the now-prominent adventurer and merchant had given to him. Yuichi would repay the beast who forced himself upon Annabelle with interest, and whoever stood in his way would meet the same fate. This might have been a game, but the feelings Yuichi felt were real, and nothing in this virtual world would deter him from his goal, even if it meant going down the same path of evil as the very person he was hunting for. Five months had already passed, but the hatred he felt for the man only burned hotter with each passing day.

You cannot catch devils with angels, Yuichi reminded himself mentally. He was justified in his acts – that was what he told himself. Nothing in this world is true; hence, everything in this world is permitted, as long as one was able to accept the consequences of one’s actions. Yuichi had already accepted what he had to become for the sake of revenge, and this was a path he would rather tread alone. An eye for an eye; one sin weighed against another – that was the tit-for-tat logic that drove Yuichi to stomach his heinous acts to slowly, but surely, become the nightmare that would haunt Conrad Carlson in the void.

Back to the Present…

“—and that is that, ma’am,” finished off the human, his expression a haunting calm of that of a man who had nothing left to lose. He had very much confessed his sin to a stranger he just met, entrusting her with a very clear image of him that he was not someone who was worthy of her brightness. He had no choice; he had to go deeper into the blackest depths of Hell to fulfill his duty to himself and to his friend. Whatever she did with such information was for her to know, and Yuichi himself no longer had any will to impose his games upon the risk of further wasting her time with his unworthy self.

“I will let you decide, ma’am; you have heard my song, as well as my sin, so I will leave it up to you,” he proposed, bowing his head almost as if at a confessionary before the image of a deity capable of absolving him of his sins. To this end, he humored her with a bevy of quotes from Romeo and Juliet, just as she quoted to him before; strung together to make a coherent reply that paradoxically encompassed himself in the words of a master playwright.

“A rose by any other name may smell just as sweet, but do not waste your love on someone who does not value it. My only love springs from my only hate; these violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die, like fire and powder which, as they kiss, consume.”

He shook his head once more, looked up to the elf, and then back down again in apology; pain somewhat visible even from his stone-faced mien. “I apologize if I caused you trouble, ma’am. We should never have met.

 

While the faerin was surely one of the squeamish type, she was surprisingly calm for the story told to her. Regularly in her mind, as he described the brilliant details of his interrogative trials against the elderly man of this world, she could only ponder if it was a scene from a crime drama remade.

She wondered many things, really. His different descriptions, his alterations of idioms- each word spoken left not a scar, but a marking on her mind and heart. His regular implication of angels and demons, of blood and obsession towards a particular enemy- it was all too easy to listen to, without making her feel even remotely like vomiting. Perhaps it was because this was all in a game, or perhaps she was just growing better with the more weary state of the world itself.

"I know not this Conrad Carlson. I know not whether he is an adventurer like us two, or a fellow from this world itself. Those are things your story cannot tell me. I can't tell what lead to your obsession and desire to defeat this fellow, either...But there are things I can tell you, certainly, even from your memory you've shared."

Part of her wanted to sing the thoughts, but she opted not to for a change due to lacking just the right words to describe them poetically. She rambled in her thoughts, seeking just the right depiction of what she'd heard and how she felt at this moment in time. Perhaps she'd go backwards from things he said. After all, hadn't he just claimed her luck bad?

"While you may think it is bad for me to have met you, I think it a good experience, not foul. If anyone earns darkness from it, perhaps it might be you from our encounter. After all, while I learned much and am enjoying our time together, you are forced to recall the things you find unsavory of your life. We all have our demons, Yuuichi."

Sipping her drink, she mulled over her rambling before continuing. He'd had his turn, now it was time for her's. "There is no such thing as a perfect person, not in the true reality of the world. Even angels can be tainted. Even gods can go mad. What matters is not always the sins you commit, but your desire to fix them. And, from your very belief that your actions are sins...I can tell you have a desire for change, both in the world and in yourself."