Chapter Text
In a warm restaurant we begin our tale,
where a young man, having bravely saved an unfortunate soul from drowning,
currently devours his reward, paid for by the grudging purse of the rescuee's companion.
This much is true in many worlds.
However in this one, our intrepid cast bear unfamiliar faces.
For here is a world where, instead of a tiger, a giant turtle slowly stalks the night.
Indeed, now the moment of its mention has come ‘round,
it is time for our hero to be struck with terror.
At the mention of the turtle he fled, heart pounding
what dark fate awaited them?
who could escape its slow but inexorable approach?
Such thoughts as these flew through his mind.
His escape, however, was but a brief attempt - for quickly did the slight Kunikida reveal his surprising strength.
Oh! how misled had Atsushi been, his perception coloured by the screen-printed t-shirt his adversary wore, and his gaming terminology.
But appearances are deceiving - even gamers can be swole.
A valuable lesson for Atsushi,
but as the price was his failure to escape, he would rather have left the lesson unlearned.
He shuddered.
He remembered the eyes of the turtle,
its dark baleful gaze reflected in a mirror, paralyzing him,
as without a sound it approached.
As before, the question occurred to him, how was the turtle tracking him?
Turtles were not known for their speed, how could it keep up?
When the orphanage had abruptly expelled him, he had assumed their reasoning to be a smokescreen,
their claims of his bringing the turtle of ill-repute upon them to be baseless,
but he had seen it many times since he had departed.
This was clearly no ordinary giant turtle;
It was shrouded in the occult, its nature unknown.
An ordinary turtle would not have haunted an orphanage garden in its search for vegetables.
The more he thought, the more he struggled against Kunikida.
As usual for Atsushi, his struggles were in vain.
There was no escape.
He related the sad and sordid tale to the mismatched pair,
the whole while, his eyes fixed on Dazai’s platform shoes.
Kunikida scoffed, and spoke.
“Yeah right,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm (the mother tongue of the gamer).
“Chased by the turtle since the orphanage? Have you crawled the entire way,
your belly to the ground?”
Atsushi’s spirits sunk further into despair.
He could envision
no happy future for himself.
Warm-eyed Dazai spoke, his hat tilted up,
“Kunikida-kun, be not harsh. Do not pour your frustrations out into this boy’s ears,
like moldy soup that was left for too many days out on the stove,
and now bears a blue fuzzy coat two inches thick. Your words are too unhealthy,
they will spread allergies throughout the apartment-“
(“wait, that was you who left the soup out?” Kunikida interjected.
“we had to fumigate the entire building! i had to use cafe wifi that lagged incessantly for a week!”)
Dazai serenely ignored any interruptions and continued blithely,
“This turtle may possess dark and mystical abilities beyond human ken,
let us not arbitrarily dismiss the thought that it darkly stalks Atsushi here;
it may well be able to teleport,
to better consume any prey that escapes its plodding stride.”
He finished his ramble with a gentle smile, an expression
bitterly at odds with the ominous words he had muttered.
More affected by the words than the expression,
(which, after all, he could not see),
scattered spots began to float before Atsushi’s eyes,
miniature fireworks lighting up in his vision, as the sound of static grew in his ears.
A giant, man-eating teleporting turtle!
What a fearsome creature to conceive of!
Even more fearsome, to have it chase after you!
At every step, Atsushi had felt he had reached the bottom,
but no sooner did he arrive than another step revealed itself,
and thus he plunged further into despair,
no light could now reach him.