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1.
Slime mold everywhere. Remnan has already been engulfed, which is probably what happened to Setsu after they shoved you in an escape pod and kept trying to save everyone else. It doesn't really faze you anymore when they die horrible, painful deaths, but you're a bit disappointed they didn't get in after you. The pod is very, very intimate.
You are 6' 5" and you don't fit. Wires and straps assail you from every direction, you've bruised your entire body against corners, someone else's feet are in your face, it's pitch black, and now your knee is pushing into something uncomfortably warm and squishy—
"Don't make me destroy you myself," Yuriko warns.
Panic. You smash your elbow against the flight computer. It's like encountering a centipede, except it's worse because the centipede only has two legs and it's Yuriko.
You realize there is no God left to save you.
Desperation. The ferryman of the dead has taken the form of a teenage girl and you're stuck 69-ing her in a pod covered in acidic slime that just ate your best friend. This loop is bad. This loop is genuinely, incredibly awful.
(That probably means there's some crew data to be discovered, if you survive long enough.)
"I'm stuck like this, aren't I," you quaver.
"Aren't we all," Yuriko says. "That's the dilemma of mortality, isn't it?"
You can't reply. Yuriko's voice has obliterated the atmosphere around you and turned your lungs into a yawning void.
"Tell me, Evelyn," Yuriko continues. "Are you really certain there isn't a God?"
She is smirking. Why the fuck is she smirking.
"Yeah, I think I'd rather just die," you say.
"Then die."
You force your palms against the rough carpet above you. Even though you've spent the last five minutes trying to orient yourself all you've succeeded in doing is accidentally touching Yuriko's ankle. Evidently, she shaves her legs. It is threateningly, unbelievably ordinary.
Despite your years of mental illness recreational suicidal ideation, there isn't actually an easy way to kill yourself right now. You could just let Yuriko kill you, although it would probably obliterate your existence from every loop or fuck you up literally forever, and, well, Setsu—
Yuriko snickers. "Pathetic."
Cold sweat. Loneliness. Your best friend is dead and you want to hold their hand. Feel the warmth of their palm. Sometimes, they whisper into your ear that you're a valid woman and you melt in ways so unlike the acidic hell you're trapped in—
You eventually start crying. Soft, warm salt over the bridge of your nose runs down your face into the opposite ear. All you have to do is loop again but you can't figure out how to die safely.
2.
Wet, sloppy slime noises gush over the outside of the escape pod.
Yuriko's breath tickles your leg hair. You hate the intimacy, hate the fact that now you kind of know what she smells like up close, hate that your leg is cramping just because you don't want to accidentally knee her in the boob again—this is awful. This is truly, unmitigatedly awful in every single way. It doesn't even help that you're pansexual and outrageously horny most of the time. This fucking sucks.
Actually, why is it that you're bothering to respect Yuriko's personal space when you hate her this much? You could probably kick her to death right now. Setsu murders Sha-Ming all the time and doesn't seem to suffer any negative psychological consequences. Although they're never locked in an escape pod with the body for hours afterward—
"Evelyn, do you truly believe that I won't kill you first?"
A chill runs down your spine.
"Do you truly believe that there is something you can think that I won't simply know? Would you even deign to pretend that?"
Your breath stops. You have to pray. Imagine Setsu opening the pod and collecting you in their arms. At the very least you'll die eventually, see them in the next loop, and Yuriko will forget this forever—
"A laughable proposition."
"Stop reading my mind," you rasp.
Yuriko sniffs. "Then stop all that infernal thinking."
"Okay, how are you doing that?" you ask. "The mind-reading thing. How does that work?"
You experience Yuriko smirk. You can't see, feel, or hear it but it certainly happens. "Who can say?"
"Um... You? You can say?"
Yuriko scoffs. "I have no capacity to describe the whims of the cosmos."
"But weren't you, like, a priestess of the Hoshibune?"
"I may be a vessel to knowledge beyond your comprehension, but I'm hardly a God."
You continue sweating. There is a lot of sweat already and now there's more.
"False idolatry," Yuriko says. "The crutch of the foolish. I'm disappointed in you, Evelyn."
"Why are you like this?" you say. It's not a question. It's an accusation.
"Evelyn," Yuriko says. "Have you even considered the notion that you're disrespecting me? That you have, actively, been disrespecting me since you flung yourself into my escape pod?"
You consider it.
"When you first entered this, you kicked me in the breast and then recoiled as if you'd seen a centipede, but worse. Then you contemplated suicide rather than apologizing to me—have you even considered that it's possible to have a conversation with me?"
"I—I assumed the answer was no."
Yuriko sniffs. "What is it that occurs when you make assumptions, Evelyn? What is it that you make out of you and me?"
"I—what? What are you—"
"It's an ass, Evelyn. When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. So what does that make you?"
"An ass," you say, humiliated.
"Sorry," you add.
Things continue to be awkward.
3.
You sneeze on Yuriko's leg.
There's not really a way to hide what just happened. She definitely felt it. Maybe you should just wipe it off with your sleeve? Although provoking her further might make everything way worse. Somehow.
You wipe it off with your sleeve.
4.
Muscles in your back are cramped into knots like those fucked up trees past the ridge on your parents' farm.
If you wanted to, you could probably spend the rest of this loop reminiscing about home. It was a horrible, decrepit place full of religious zealots who spat on you and called you the f-slur for walking on the side of the road in clothes that made you comfortable, but it was everything you ever knew.
(You never expected to miss that hell.)
At the very least, if everyone who hated you really did go to heaven, they won't be waiting for you in the underworld. And if all queer people go to hell—maybe you'll finally have a place to call your own.
"A laughable idea," Yuriko says. "Pure defeatism. Hardly an act of reclamation."
It's getting easier to take the mind-reading in stride. She has a judgmental and vaguely threatening way of phrasing things but now that you're aware that you're being an asshole, it really is just a statement.
"That's what I grew up in," you say. "Everyone on IV—well, not me, and not my sister, and I guess mom tried—but basically everyone believed that."
"How disgustingly human," Yuriko says. "Contemptuous vermin, the lot of us. Spreading our pestilent bigotry like cockroaches."
"Well, that's what they grew up with, too. It was a small town."
"Of course it was. What else could make one yearn for solace in the pits of torture?"
You snort.
"And now you're stuck here with me," Yuriko says. "Alone together in purgatory, with only the memory of your beloved and the promise of queer damnation. How tragic."
You start wondering why Yuriko seems to get it so much.
"So," you test. "Did you also grow up in a small town?"
"So I did."
"What was it like?"
Yuriko pauses. "I gradually increased in height, weight, and lived experience under the watchful eye of a nuclear family."
You splutter. "So you were normal?"
Yuriko doesn't reply. Contempt fills the air around you.
"For real," you say. "What was it actually like?"
Yuriko sighs. "Each day was spent ingratiating myself to the whims of some arbitrary folk religion based around bovine dairy production and the idolatry of eleven heavily armored packaging workers. Sin was in the very name of that place."
"Yeah, sounds like home."
"Both typical agrarian societies," Yuriko says. "And more likely than not, my people—if I dared stoop to such an allegiance—colonized yours."
You think about your old high-school friends. Farmers and jocks who wore baseball caps and climbed gas stations to smoke as dusk summoned swarms of insects—it was a typical boyhood, approximately. You might even have been grateful for it if you weren't a girl.
One day, you were going to leave that place. It wasn't that your loved ones held you back as their health failed—it was real love, after all—and it wasn't even that the air of stagnant hopelessness finally got to you. You could farm. You could wake up with the sun, tend to all the animals in the field, live as one with the soil you owned—it was all there. Then, in the evenings, you'd sit with a can of Bud Light and look into the sky as mainland Liu-An rose to blot out the stars and you'd wonder, just maybe, that there was someone else out there like you.
"What made you leave?" you ask.
"I was spirited away in the night to become a priestess, of course."
You wrinkle your nose. "Why?"
"Because, Evelyn, young girls are fresh meat, and there are many farms in this Universe that require a steady stream of livestock."
"The Hoshibune."
"Naturally," Yuriko says. "Do you find me terrifying, Evelyn?"
"Yes."
"Then you hardly know the meaning of the word."
"God," you say. "What did they do to you?"
"Why, I was enlightened to the tenets of their faith. There are depths of the soul that can only be explored through excruciation, and I basked in the image of their God until I became the thing that survived it. Nothing more."
"That's—but what does that have to do with digitization? Isn't that what they had you do?"
"What does it have to do, indeed?" Yuriko says. "There is order to the world, Evelyn. There is a reason why anyone is here, and I remain a slave to the same forces, however incomprehensible they are."
"So a bunch of random people just kidnapped you and put you in a torture cult," you state. "Aren't you just, like, nineteen?"
"Were the concept of time as naive as yourself, it would seem to be so."
"Fuck," you say. "So you're just a fucked up kid like me."
Yuriko laughs, hollow.
"So where are you going?" you say. "After all this is over."
"Away."
"Just away? Not back home?"
"No. There is nothing left but a tangle of sins and bad habits. I'm much like yourself in that regard."
You think about it. Consider the knot of grief in your chest and all the shattered concrete and beloved memories that vanish into a plume of stardust with the rest of Liu-An at the start of every loop.
"So," you say. "If you're like me... does that mean..."
There must be a twinkle in Yuriko's eye. You can feel it. A tremor of amusement.
"I am not the friend you long for," she says. "But yes. There is a means by which I survived the Hoshibune, and an end to which I flee."
You breathe together in darkness.
"Setsu truly does love you," Yuriko says. "You two are sickening together. Certainly you must understand what it feels like to follow a person to the end of the Universe and keep going."
"So," you repeat. "So... you're..."
You feel Yuriko roll her eyes. It's the most vicious eye roll you've ever felt.
"Sorry," you say. "For being a dick."
"Apology accepted."
5.
"I don't think anyone's coming to save us," you say.
"Of course not," Yuriko says. "Shall we die horribly, then?"
Acidic slime is already dripping through cracks it's eaten in the pod. One way or another, it is time.
"See you in the next loop?" you say.
Yuriko scoffs. "I intend not to set eyes on you again."
The escape hatch was on Yuriko's side all along, you realize. She could have ended this much sooner, and didn't.
This whole thing, you think, was really fucking weird.
You're still terrified of her.
(Somehow, you're even still terrified of death.)
All you know is that Setsu endured the same thing. They're stronger than you. Stronger than anyone you've ever known. Soon, you will wake up in your bed to their face and the memory of acid—what was it Yuriko had said? The promise of queer damnation?
Yuriko heaves the door open. Sheets of green fluid spill over her body—through her body, revealing only skin and bone and flesh and her bored, expressionless face—maybe she is just a girl.
Acid strips your body down to raw pain, all nerves and tension and the taste of blood until there's no part of your face left to taste with.
It is the worst death you've ever died.
You're glad to share it.