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"So you don't know how to do it either?" Though she had spent the morning picking through code and documentation, Michiru had yet to find any mention of some obscure aspect of Doll maintenance. She frowned, so sure that Emiri might have known how the systems interfaced together.
"That's really more his speciality, ehe." Emiri set down her tools, leaving a half-assembled collar on the table. "Someone needs to go fetch the Little Prince. How about we do the usual?"
The pair of researchers raised their hands, speaking in unison.
"Jan ken pon!"
A grin spread across Emiri's face, her throw of scissors slowly raised into a peace sign. Michiru lowered her open hand, nervously chewing on a corner of her lip.
"I never win these..." she muttered.
"Ahaha, suck it up!" said Emiri. "It's not like you're having to drive out to his place!"
With some trepidation, Michiru headed to the elevator. Living quarters were on a lower floor, meaning she could tell the sinking feeling in her stomach wasn't from a rapid ascent. Sou had effectively been under house arrest for some time now, after his ill-fated meeting with Alice Yabusame, and since he no longer appeared to have a home outside of the facility that meant...
Well, that meant holing himself up in the room he was intended to have as a Candidate.
Since that fateful day, the day he had died in the eyes of the law, Sou Hiyori had been acting even more erratically than usual. Given his behavior before having several feet of iron railings impaling him, it hadn't even been immediately obvious what the problem was. He mostly showed up to work on time, confined to lab work as he was, but it had become a frequent occurrence for him to avoid his co-workers entirely.
With nobody else yet present in the Death Game's grounds, Michiru's footsteps echoed unabated through empty corridors. Some of these rooms and hallways never would be used - she knew enough of the planned game to know they were fated to be collapsed, rendered completely inaccessible to anyone in order to seal participants and floormasters alike within. Walking through such a passage, doomed to be buried beneath tons of rock and rubble, made her feel uncomfortably like a ghost, here to seek counsel with a dead man.
She hesitantly raised a hand, and rapped against the door of Sou's chamber. No sound of response came from within, so after a few moments she tapped her knuckles against it again, a little more forcefully.
"...Sou? Are you there?" No answer. "We, um... we need your help with..."
She trailed off. Her co-worker hadn't given a single indication he was present at all. Maybe he wasn't even there.
It wouldn't hurt to try the door handle and check, would it?
She put one hand on the door, and pressed down on the door handle. It slowly gave way - it didn't appear to be locked. The room beyond wasn't pitch-black. though it was close. The lights had been turned down as low as they'd go. The bed was made, though not entirely neatly - she knew Sou had long-since modified his body to go without sleep, so he didn't strictly need to have a bed, but maybe he had been laying on it regardless.
The furniture in these rooms was fairly standard. A couple of fairly comfortable seats, a pair of lights on one side of the bed, false windows that presented only an inky blackness. The windows in Maple's room gave an illusion of a sunny day, but these felt less like a starless night sky and more like the lonely void of deep space.
Sou didn't seem to have brought much to this room. At least, that was the impression Michiru had until she turned to face a wall she hadn't yet glanced at.
Dozens of photographs of various sizes were pinned up, so many that they were overlapping. Every one from a different angle, taken on a different day, but every single one depicted the same smiling young man.
"Shin Tsukimi..." she whispered. One of the candidates, and one she knew of primarily because Sou was always getting in trouble with the higher-ups over him. He had been working for Asunaro since he was a child, and if what Emiri told her was true he had been assigned to investigate Shin when both boys were teens. He was always saying Shin needed more study, more detail to his AI.
There were times it felt like Sou had rearranged his life to focus on Shin, instead of his work with Asunaro.
"It's a shame I can't take more of them." He didn't make any noise when entering the room, so the words of the young man by her side startled her for a moment.
"I w-won't tell anyone," she finally managed to murmur in response.
Sou laughed, giving a dismissive wave of his hand. "Aha, don't worry! Emiri's very much aware." His eyes narrowed just a little, gaze turning from the gloomy woman to the wall of smiling faces. "I've been annoying her with reports for a long time!"
"There's poetry in the Shin AI's comments..." she said, half-remembering green words in amongst the black letters that made up its programming. It had never felt important when stepping through the code - beyond her first time reading it, she ignored any possibility of it containing some hidden indication of how to tweak variables.
"In my reports too, ahaha!" He twirled the end of his scarf in his fingers, seeming a little agitated despite his demeanor.
Michiru's eyes trailed over the collage of pictures. Every single one seemed to be a candid picture, capturing a genuine smile from the beanie-wearing boy. None were posed, or even had anyone else's face visible. "You really cared about each other..."
"We lived together for years, Namida." Hiyori had turned to face her fully, for the first time since he had entered the room.
"Were you boyf..." She stopped, chewing her lip for a moment as Sou gave her a bemused stare. "Were you dating?"
"Hmm." For once, Sou seemed genuinely at a loss for words. "You'd have to ask him"
He let himself fall backwards into a comfortable chair, his legs crossed. "You didn't come here to ask about my love life, aha."
"...Does it hurt to think about him?" she asked.
"Every second," he admitted. "But I would never want to forget him," he added, pre-empting an offer Michiru was about to make before she could even open her mouth.
Memory manipulation was far less of an imprecise science nowadays, especially with the dubiously ethical experiments Michiru herself had proposed and performed. Those who had witnessed Sou's supposed death simply numbered too high for that kind of coverup to be fully successful, but in a less public space it was far from impossible to round up those present and simply tweak their perception of the event to carefully excise one person. It was even simpler with a willing participant, asking to remove their own worst memories.
But Sou... Sou wanted to remember. Wanted to be remembered.
Was he regretting that Shin Tsukimi had no pictures of him to plaster his own walls with?