Would Serve Her Right

10 posts!

Would be even better if Nana is killed by someone she trusted. Would be nicely ironic

Chapter 1: The Unwanted Journey

The absolute, unequivocal last sensation Arthur Ainsworth, fifty-one years, three months, and a dreary Tuesday into a life he often felt was on loan from a particularly uninspired mail-order catalogue, registered with any degree of certainty was the gritty, slightly abrasive texture of overly toasted wholemeal bread lodging uncomfortably between his teeth. The sharp, familiar, and frankly unwelcome tang of too-bitter, cheap chunky marmalade still coated his tongue. He’d been staring blankly out of his perpetually damp Crawley kitchen window, past the condensation fogging the lower pane, at the aggressively, almost offensively cheerful fuschia in Mrs. Henderson’s meticulously manicured, gnome-infested garden. He was contemplating, with a familiar sense of existential dread, the yawning, featureless abyss of another interminable Tuesday morning meeting about synergistic resource allocation and departmental overheads, when the very fabric of his mundane reality had simply… dissolved.

Not in a gentle, cinematic fade to black, but with a violent, nauseating, wrenching compression, as if he were being forcibly, painfully squeezed through the eye of a cosmic needle that was far too small for his middle-aged, slightly paunchy frame. A silent scream, a pure rictus of terror and disbelief, tore from lungs that, a horrifying microsecond later, felt alarmingly… undersized, tight, and distressingly inefficient.

He blinked. Once. Twice. His vision swam, a nauseating, disorienting blur like looking through a disturbed goldfish bowl that had been filled with murky water. The comforting, slightly musty, entirely familiar aroma of his own small kitchen – old tea towels needing a boil wash, the faint, lingering ghost of last night’s overcooked shepherd’s pie, the metallic tang of the ancient gas hob – was gone, brutally, inexplicably supplanted. Now, his nostrils flared against an aggressive, unwelcome olfactory assault: the sharp, briny sting of sea air, the unmistakable, oily reek of diesel fumes, and beneath it all, a cloying, faintly sweetish, almost chemical perfume he couldn’t quite identify – cheap cherry blossom air freshener, perhaps? It made his stomach roil with a sudden, violent wave of nausea.

He wasn’t standing, a half-eaten piece of toast clutched in his rapidly cooling hand. He was seated, or rather, vibrating, perched precariously on a ridiculously hard, unforgivingly cold plastic bench that thrummed with the powerful, rhythmic, almost hypnotic beat of a massive engine. The vibration resonated through his slight, unfamiliar frame, up his spine, and into his teeth, making them ache. His entire field of vision still swam, a nauseating blur that slowly, reluctantly, resolved into... a boat? No, this was larger, more substantial. A ferry, judging by its considerable size and the churning, slate-grey-green water visible through a salt-streaked, grimy window.

His hands. He stared down at his hands, which were resting, almost formally, on knees that felt strangely knobbly, pointed, and alarmingly close to his face. They were small, slender, the skin unnervingly smooth and pale, entirely unblemished. Gone were the familiar, comforting liver spots, the intricate network of fine wrinkles he’d painstakingly earned over fifty-one years of worry and indifferent skincare. Gone, most shockingly, was the faded, silvery-white scar on his left thumb, a cherished, almost nostalgic memento from a foolish, boyish attempt to whittle a stick with his father’s intimidatingly sharp penknife when he was barely ten. These were the hands of a boy, a complete stranger. A wave of pure, unadulterated vertigo, cold and terrifying, washed over him, making the already unsteady deck beneath his feet seem to tilt and sway even more alarmingly.

Panic, sharp, icy, and visceral as a shard of glass plunged into his chest, clawed its way up his throat, a silent, suffocating, desperate scream. He looked down further, a strangled, wheezing gasp escaping lips that felt thin, unfamiliar, and strangely unresponsive to his mental commands. A pristine, almost unnaturally dark-blue school uniform – a tailored blazer with an unfamiliar, elaborate embroidered crest on the breast pocket, a stark white, slightly stiff shirt, a neatly, tightly knotted tie that felt like a miniature noose around his suddenly slender neck, and sharply creased, unfamiliar trousers – encased a frame so lean, so light, it felt like inhabiting a fragile, empty birdcage. His comfortable, tea-stained cardigan, his worn, beloved corduroys, his trusty, down-at-heel slippers – all relegated to a life, a world, a self, that felt galaxies, lifetimes, away.

This isn't happening, the thought was a frantic, desperate, looping denial against the overwhelming, irrefutable sensory evidence. This is a stroke. A brain aneurysm. A complete psychotic breakdown. A ridiculously vivid, cheese-induced dream brought on by that questionable Stilton I had before bed. But the insistent, bone-jarring thrum of the powerful engine beneath him, the penetrating chill of the damp sea air seeping through the thin, unfamiliar fabric of the school uniform, the too-tight, starched collar chafing uncomfortably against his strangely youthful skin – it was all terrifyingly, undeniably, horribly concrete.

He was on a ferry. A modern, somewhat utilitarian vessel, judging by the functional, uncomfortable plastic seating and the smeary, salt-streaked windows that offered a bleak, uninviting view of the turbulent, grey-green water churning past under a bruised, weeping, overcast sky. In the middle distance, wreathed in a swirling, clinging mist that seemed to swallow the light, an island rose steeply, almost menacingly, from the restless sea, its slopes a dense, unbroken, unwelcoming carpet of dark green. It reminded him, vaguely, unsettlingly, of some of the starker, more dramatic parts of the south coast back home, but… wrong. Utterly, fundamentally wrong. The light was wrong, the air felt wrong, the very angle of the sun, when it briefly, weakly, pierced the oppressive cloud cover, seemed alien. What a dreadful, dreadful May this was turning out to be, he thought with a sudden, bizarrely specific pang of dislocated misery, before shaking his head to dispel the irrelevant, nonsensical thought.

Around him, other teenagers – actual, living, breathing teenagers, their faces a sea of youthful energy and incomprehensible expressions – chattered and laughed and scrolled through their phones, their voices a bewildering, overwhelming cacophony in a language that flowed around him like fast-moving water, every sibilant hiss, every sharp vowel, every lilting intonation entirely, utterly alien and incomprehensible. They all wore the same dark blue uniform, a depressing ocean of conformity. They were all, he noted with a fresh, sinking wave of despair, Japanese.

“Excuse me,” he tried, the English words feeling thick, clumsy, unnaturally foreign, and obscenely loud in this new, higher-pitched, unfamiliar voice. A few heads turned, their expressions ranging from mild curiosity to outright, disdainful indifference. Blank, uncomprehending eyes stared back at him for a moment before dismissively turning away. One girl, her hair an impossible, almost aggressive shade of bubblegum pink tied into ridiculously perky pigtails, giggled openly into her hand, then whispered something clearly amusing to her smirking friend, who also giggled. The isolation was immediate, profound, absolute. He was a foreigner in a land he didn’t recognize, in a body that wasn’t his own, speaking a language no one here apparently understood. He was, he realized with a sudden, sickening lurch of his stomach, utterly, terrifyingly alone.

His heart, this new, unfamiliar heart, hammered a frantic, panicked rhythm against ribs that felt alarmingly close to the surface of his skin. He patted the pockets of the unfamiliar school blazer, a desperate, fumbling, almost spastic search for something, anything, familiar, an anchor in this maelstrom of unreality. His worn leather wallet, with its comforting, familiar collection of well-thumbed loyalty cards, a few emergency pound coins, and that faded, creased photograph of his late, beloved spaniel, Buster? Gone. His house keys, his car keys, the comforting jingle they usually made in his pocket? Vanished. But then, his fingers, these new, slender, unnervingly smooth fingers, brushed against a familiar, solid rectangular outline in the blazer’s inside pocket.

His mobile phone. An older, slightly battered, but entirely reliable smartphone. His lifeline. With trembling, uncoordinated hands, he pulled it out, its familiar weight a small, almost insignificant comfort in this ocean of terrifying unfamiliarity. The screen flickered to life, displaying its usual, incongruously cheerful background of a slightly out-of-focus bluebell wood he’d photographed on a long-forgotten bank holiday walk. 27% battery. A fresh, sharp spike of pure, undiluted panic lanced through him, colder and more terrifying than the sea wind. Twenty-seven percent. How long would that last? Hours? Minutes? It was his only link to potential understanding, his only tool for navigating this waking nightmare.

He fumbled with the touchscreen, his larger, older man’s muscle memory struggling, fighting against the delicate, precise coordination required by these smaller, younger, entirely unfamiliar teenage hands. He found the voice translation app – a half-forgotten relic from a disastrous, sunburnt package holiday to Majorca with his ex-wife nearly a decade ago, an app he’d kept on his phone for reasons he couldn’t now fathom but was, in this moment, profoundly, desperately grateful for. He jabbed clumsily at the English-to-Japanese setting, his finger slipping twice on the smooth glass.

Clutching the phone like a drowning man grasping a flimsy piece of driftwood, he turned to a boy slumped apathetically beside him on the hard plastic bench. The boy was entirely, almost aggressively, engrossed in a sleek, brightly coloured handheld gaming device that emitted a series of tinny, irritatingly cheerful bleeps and bloops. “Excuse me,” Arthur said again, his voice shaking slightly as he spoke clearly and slowly into the phone’s microphone. The device chirped once, a small, tinny, almost hopeful sound, then emitted a short, polite, perfectly synthesized Japanese phrase.

The boy jumped as if he’d been poked with a sharp stick, startled, his game momentarily forgotten. He looked up, his eyes wide with surprise, then narrowed with suspicion as he took in Arthur’s clearly foreign, distressed appearance. He pointed a questioning finger at himself, then at Arthur. “Watashi? Anata?” (Me? You?)

Arthur nodded vigorously, a ridiculous, almost hysterical wave of relief washing over him at this tiny, fragile, almost insignificant flicker of basic human comprehension. He spoke urgently into the phone again, the question feeling utterly absurd, almost laughably inadequate, even as he voiced it. “Where are we going? Please, can you tell me where this ferry is going?”

The phone chirped. The boy listened, his expression still wary, then replied in a rapid, almost unintelligible stream of Japanese, gesturing vaguely with his free hand towards the misty, forbidding island looming ever closer on the grey horizon. The phone dutifully, if somewhat tinnily, translated back: “To the island. We are all going to the island. For the special school.”

“School?” Arthur croaked, the word catching in his throat like a fishbone. He repeated it into the phone, needing confirmation, needing something, anything, to make sense.

“Yes. The academy. For those with Talents.”

Talents? A sliver of icy, unwelcome unease, sharp as a shard of freshly broken glass, pierced through the thick fog of Arthur’s confusion and terror. The word echoed with a dark, half-forgotten, deeply unpleasant familiarity. The island. The special school. For the Talented. His mind, sluggish with shock, began to churn, to sift through old, discarded memories, searching for a connection, a terrifying, almost unthinkable recognition beginning to dawn.

The ferry docked with a gentle, almost anticlimactic bump against a solid, seaweed-stained concrete pier. The previously chattering students began to gather their bags, a river of dark blue uniforms flowing with a surprising, almost disciplined orderliness towards the disembarkation ramp. Arthur, feeling like a man walking to his own execution, followed them woodenly, his legs like leaden stilts, his mind a maelstrom of fear and dawning, horrifying comprehension. The island air, when he finally stepped onto solid, unmoving ground, was humid, heavy, carrying the cloying scent of pine needles, damp earth, and something else, something faintly metallic, like old blood. A few stern-faced adults, presumably teachers, their expressions uniformly unwelcoming, were directing the arriving students with curt, impatient gestures towards a narrow, winding path leading steeply upwards, into the island’s dense, shadowy, and deeply foreboding interior.

He walked as if in a trance, the phone clutched in his hand like a talisman against the encroaching darkness. This new, young body, this ‘Kenji Tanaka’ as his hastily discovered student ID card (found in another pocket of the unfamiliar blazer) proclaimed him to be, was a reluctant, terrified automaton, and he, Arthur Ainsworth, was its bewildered, unwilling, and increasingly horrified pilot.

Evening found him in a small, stark, sparsely furnished dormitory room, shared with another silent, sullen boy – his roommate, Suzuki, who had grunted a minimal, almost resentful greeting earlier before burying himself completely in a brightly coloured manga volume, effectively vanishing from Arthur’s immediate reality. The overwhelming, unrelenting newness of it all – the constant, bewildering barrage of the unfamiliar Japanese language assaulting his ears, the strange, unappetizing food he’d barely been able to touch at dinner (a slimy, unidentifiable fish and a bowl of disturbingly grey rice), the constant, terrifying, almost schizophrenic disconnect between his fifty-one-year-old mind and this unfamiliar, unwieldy teenage body – was crushing, suffocating.

He sat heavily on the edge of the narrow, unyielding bed, the phone’s battery indicator now a glaring, accusatory, terrifying red 15%. He needed to charge it. Urgently. Desperately. It was his only link to comprehension, his only tool for navigating this bewildering, hostile new reality. But the power sockets in the dorm room wall were a different, unfamiliar shape, and he hadn’t seen his own trusty charger since… well, since his own familiar, comforting kitchen in Crawley, a lifetime, an eternity, ago.

He had to think. He forced his panicked, reeling mind to focus. Talented. Island academy for the Talented. Snippets of disjointed conversation, hazy, half-recalled images from a garishly coloured, excessively violent animation his teenage nephew had been briefly, inexplicably obsessed with some years ago, flickered like faulty neon signs at the frayed edges of his memory. A pretty, innocent-looking girl with bright pink hair and an unnervingly sweet, almost predatory smile. A sullen, white-haired boy with an obsession with immortality and a penchant for asking inconvenient questions. Gruesome, inventive deaths, casually, almost gleefully, inflicted. Dark secrets. Government conspiracies.

Talentless Nana.

The name, the title, hit him with the force of a physical blow, knocking the last vestiges of air from his already constricted lungs. No. It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t. That was fiction, a dark, twisted, nihilistic little piece of entertainment his sister had tutted disapprovingly about. He wasn’t in an anime. Such things didn’t happen. They couldn’t happen.

But the evidence, the terrible, mounting, undeniable evidence, was all around him. The isolated island, miles from any recognizable mainland. The special school, exclusively for "Talented" youth. The subtle, pervasive undercurrent of something… predatory, something dangerous, he’d sensed beneath the thin, fragile veneer of enforced institutional normalcy.

If this was true, if this waking nightmare was indeed his new reality, then he was in unimaginable, immediate, and quite possibly terminal danger. Everyone here was. And he, Arthur Ainsworth, a mild-mannered, unremarkable, fifty-one-year-old former accounts clerk from the peaceful, predictable suburbs of Crawley, was trapped, helpless and horrified, in the unfamiliar, ill-fitting body of a Japanese schoolboy named Kenji Tanaka, days, perhaps mere hours, from the inevitable arrival of a ruthless, highly trained, government-sanctioned teenage assassin.

The phone’s screen flickered ominously, then dimmed. 10%.

The raw, animalistic panic gave way, momentarily, to a desperate, pragmatic, almost cold urgency. He had to find a charger. A compatible one. And a socket that would accept it. Now. Without the phone, without his translator, without his only tenuous link to the world around him, he was deaf, dumb, defenceless, and almost certainly, irrecoverably, dead.

He scrambled to his feet, his earlier exhaustion forgotten, replaced by a surge of pure, undiluted adrenaline. He left his silent, manga-absorbed roommate without a word and ventured cautiously out into the dimly lit, echoing corridor. The dorm was quieting down for the night, most of the other students presumably already in their rooms. He found a common room at the end of the corridor, its lights still on, though it was deserted. It smelled faintly of stale noodles and cheap cleaning fluid. A few students were chatting quietly within, others were hunched over textbooks, already studying. His eyes, wild and desperate, scanned the walls, searching. There. A grimy, overloaded power strip, with a couple of tantalizingly vacant sockets. And discarded carelessly on a low, battered coffee table, amidst a scattering of empty snack wrappers, discarded manga volumes, and students’ textbooks, was a tangled, spaghetti-like mess of assorted charging cables. One of them, a generic-looking black one, looked promising, its micro-USB connector seemingly, blessedly, similar to his own phone’s charging port.

His heart pounding in his throat like a trapped bird, he darted forward and snatched it up. It was a cheap, no-name brand, but the connector looked right. He hurried back to the precious, vacant sockets in the power strip, his hands shaking so badly he could barely insert the plug. He then, with a silent, fervent prayer to any deity, any force, any cosmic entity that might conceivably be listening in this godforsaken corner of reality, connected the other end of the cable to his phone.

The charging icon appeared on the screen. 10%. Then, after an agonizing, heart-stopping pause, 11%.

A tiny, almost hysterical, choked laugh escaped him, a sound perilously close to a sob. One problem, at least, one immediate, life-threatening crisis, was temporarily, blessedly, solved. But as he slumped weakly against the cool, indifferent wall, watching the battery percentage slowly, painstakingly, begin to climb, the larger, more terrifying, more inescapable reality of his utterly impossible situation settled upon him with a crushing, suffocating, and unyielding weight. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, on Murder Island. And the deadly, bloody games, he knew with a certainty that chilled him to the very marrow of his new, young bones, were about to begin.

posting nothing but ai and hate in main tags/on others posts isnt gonna get you very far on tumblr

That is a great question. But needless to say, it's nothing to care about.

Nana is a dislikable character - that's what this account is for.

More AI stuff coming soon!

Chapter 35: Unravelling Threads of a Told Tomorrow

The fire in the damp cave crackled, spitting a shower of orange sparks into the heavy, charged silence that followed Arthur Ainsworth’s almost whispered invitation. For a long moment, no one spoke. The only sound was the distant, ceaseless roar of the hidden waterfall, a monotonous, indifferent rush of water that seemed to echo the vast, empty chasm of disbelief his words had torn open in their reality. Nana Hiiragi stared at him, her expression a battlefield of warring emotions: shock, anger, a dawning, horrified comprehension, and beneath it all, a flicker of something else – a desperate, almost unwilling hope. Kyouya Onodera’s usually impassive features were tight with a focused, almost predatory intensity, his mind clearly working at furious speed to process, dissect, and analyze the impossible. Michiru Inukai looked pale and stricken, her gentle eyes wide with a mixture of fear and a deep, compassionate sorrow for the sheer, unbelievable weight Arthur must have been carrying. Even Jin Tachibana, his enigmatic calm usually an impenetrable shield, seemed to regard Arthur with a new, sharp, almost piercing alertness.

It was Kyouya who finally broke the spell, his voice preternaturally calm, yet with an underlying edge as sharp as the makeshift blade resting by his side. “Ainsworth-san,” he began, the use of Arthur’s true surname a deliberate, pointed acknowledgement of the new reality between them. “You claim this… ‘story’… this ‘Munō na Nana’… it accurately depicted events on the island, events involving us, with a specificity that allowed you to make your… ‘predictions.’ How can you be certain this wasn’t merely a series of astute observations on your part, perhaps amplified by a genuine, if limited, precognitive Talent you are now choosing to deny for reasons of your own?” It was a logical, almost lawyerly challenge, an attempt to find a more rational, if still extraordinary, explanation.

Arthur met his gaze squarely. “Because, Onodera-san,” he said, his voice weary but firm, his Japanese surprisingly steady, “the details were too specific. Not just the ‘who’ but often the ‘how,’ sometimes even snatches of dialogue, internal motivations of characters that I couldn’t possibly have guessed. The sequence of Nana-san’s targets in that first year, for example, the methods she employed… many were almost identical to what I remembered from this… this narrative.” He paused. “And believe me, if I actually possessed a genuine Talent for seeing the future, I would likely have managed this entire horrifying situation with considerably more competence and far fewer… casualties.” The self-deprecating bitterness in his tone was palpable.

Nana spoke next, her voice low, hoarse, almost raw. “This… ‘Nana’… in your story. You said she… she changed. That she started to… to save Talents? That she wanted to destroy Tsuruoka?” There was a desperate, almost hungry intensity in her eyes. “Did it say how? Did it show her succeeding? What else did it say about… about what I became?”

Arthur looked at her, his heart aching with a complex pity. “The story, as I said, was ongoing when I… left my time. It showed her making that profound shift, yes. Driven by… well, by events similar to what you yourself experienced, Nana-san. By betrayal, by the realization of Tsuruoka’s true nature, by the influence of… of someone like Michiru-san.” He glanced at Michiru, who flushed slightly. “She became fiercely determined to dismantle everything Tsuruoka had built. As for how she went about it, or if she ultimately succeeded… those were parts of the story I never got to see. It was, as you might say, a continuing serial. I only had access to the ‘published volumes’ up to a certain point.” He hesitated. “It did show her becoming… incredibly ruthless in her pursuit of Tsuruoka. Almost as ruthless as she had been when serving him.”

“And my parents?” Nana pressed, her voice barely a whisper now. “The story… it truly said Tsuruoka arranged their murders? That they weren’t… my fault?”

“It was unequivocally clear on that point,” Arthur affirmed gently. “They were good people who opposed him. He had them eliminated and then, with sickening cruelty, manipulated you into believing you were responsible, to break you and bind you to him. That was a central, tragic element of your character’s backstory in the narrative.”

Nana closed her eyes, a single tear escaping and tracing a path through the grime on her cheek. The validation, however bizarre its source, seemed to offer a tiny, almost unbearable sliver of solace.

“What about the Committee?” Kyouya interjected, his focus shifting to more strategic concerns. “Did this narrative provide details about its internal structure? Its ultimate objectives beyond what you’ve already speculated? Were there insights into Tsuruoka’s specific long-term plans, or the identities of other key figures within the organization?”

Arthur sighed. “Frustratingly few concrete details, I’m afraid. Tsuruoka was always depicted as the primary antagonist, the mastermind. Other Committee members were shadowy, ill-defined figures. Their goals seemed to be about control, about manipulating society through fear of Talents, and perhaps, as I mentioned, about weaponizing those ‘Enemies of Humanity.’ But the intricate details of their hierarchy or their decades-long endgame… that was mostly left to speculation even within the story’s fanbase, as far as I can recall.” He paused. “Explaining a Japanese comic book that somehow predicted, or perhaps even influenced, their entire horrific existence… it felt like trying to summarize a particularly bizarre, convoluted dream to a skeptical psychiatrist. Or perhaps attempting to convince the local parish council back in Crawley – or for that matter, any sensible, rational person from Chichester to Land’s End – that their lives, their deepest pains and struggles, were nothing more than a work of popular fiction from another dimension. Utterly, certifiably mad.”

Michiru, who had been listening with a mixture of wide-eyed horror and profound sadness, finally spoke, her voice small and trembling. “Arthur-san… were… were other people we knew from the island… people like Nanao-kun, or Hoshino-kun, or Tachibana-kun… were they also… characters in this story? Did you know what was going to happen to them too, all along?”

Arthur looked at her gentle, troubled face, and the weight of his past inactions, his often-ineffectual interventions, pressed down on him anew. “Yes, Michiru-san,” he said softly. “Many of them were. And yes, I had… glimpses… of their fates. Sometimes clearer than others. As I tried to explain to Kyouya-san, my knowledge was often too little, too late, or too vague to act upon decisively without risking even greater catastrophe.”

“And what of me?” Jin Tachibana’s voice, smooth and cool as polished silk, cut through the charged atmosphere. He had remained silent throughout the exchange, his pale eyes fixed on Arthur, his expression unreadable. “This… ‘Rin’… Kyouya’s sister, who supposedly took on the identity of a boy named Jin Tachibana after a past tragedy. Was her specific role, her full story, also detailed in this… chronicle you remember so selectively, Ainsworth-san?” There was a subtle, almost imperceptible challenge in his tone.

Arthur met Jin’s gaze, choosing his words with extreme care. “The narrative I recall touched upon a character with a deeply tragic past, someone connected to Kyouya-san’s sister, yes. Someone who had been grievously harmed by the Committee’s system, who had lost their original identity, and who later operated from the shadows, with… complex and often ambiguous motivations.” He offered no more, sensing the dangerous, shifting currents beneath Jin’s calm façade. He knew he was treading on very thin ice.

“Why?” Nana asked suddenly, her voice raw with a new kind of pain. “Why didn’t you tell us all of this sooner, Arthur-san? From the very beginning?”

Arthur looked down at his hands, the hands of Kenji Tanaka, a boy whose life he had unwillingly usurped. “Would you have believed me?” he asked quietly. “If, on my first day, a strange boy speaking through a telephone had told you that your entire reality was a Japanese comic book from his world? You, Nana Hiiragi, trained assassin, would you have simply accepted that?” He shook his head. “You would have marked me for immediate elimination as a dangerous lunatic, and rightly so. I told you what I felt I could, when I felt I could, in ways I hoped might make a small difference, without getting myself killed in the process, or making things catastrophically worse. My ‘Talent depletion’ announcement after the escape… that was the first moment I felt it might be safe, or even necessary, to begin unravelling the true extent of the… absurdity of my situation.”

A long silence fell, filled only by the crackling of the fire and the distant, soothing roar of the waterfall. The survivors sat, each lost in their own thoughts, grappling with a truth that redefined their past, their present, and their utterly uncertain future. The world had not just been turned upside down; it had been revealed as a strange, distorted echo of a fiction from another dimension.

Finally, Kyouya spoke, his voice thoughtful, pragmatic. “This knowledge, however outlandish its origin, however unsettling its implications… it changes nothing about our immediate objectives. Tsuruoka is still out there. The Committee still operates. The threat to Talents, to all of us, remains.” He looked at Arthur. “But it does, perhaps, give us a new, if deeply unorthodox, perspective on our enemy. And on ourselves.”

Nana nodded slowly, a new, hard light dawning in her violet eyes, the earlier flicker of desperate hope now solidifying into something far more dangerous, more focused. “A story…” she murmured, almost to herself. “So Tsuruoka thought he was writing my story.” A small, chilling smile touched her lips. “Perhaps it’s time I started writing my own ending. And his.”

Arthur watched them, a strange sense of detachment settling over him. He had unburdened himself of his greatest secret. The pieces were now on the board, for all to see. His "one idea," the thought that had been coalescing in his mind since their escape, now felt more urgent, more necessary than ever. But first, they had to truly absorb this. They had to decide if they could even move forward together, now that the very foundations of their reality had been so profoundly, so utterly, shaken.

Grendel Jinx in Talentless Nana: A Tale of Talents and Deceptions (on Wattpad) https://www.wattpad.com/story/393719322-grendel-jinx-in-talentless-nana-a-tale-of-talents?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_myworks&wp_uname=MrTAToad 

The last thing Grendel Jinx remembered was a frying pan swinging toward her face in a Chichester warehouse, courtesy of some goon from a rival secret organization. Then, a flash of green light, a sensation like being sucked through a straw, and now-this. She blinked against the sterile white ceiling of what looked like a hospital room, the faint hum of fluorescent lights buzzing in her ears. Her head throbbed, but her limbs were intact, and her trademark leather jacket was neatly folded on a chair nearby. Not bad for a girl who'd just been yeeted across dimensions.