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I’m you.
Is it that simple?
Black Tsumuri does not quite become erased - there are ways to come back, and so she is kept. She learns later that months were taken, juggling supporter pulls for a return to the old style and those who cheered for Geats’ change. A compromise was reached - two new DGPs.
Black Tsumuri is handed to Samas and the GM dug out of the basement - Cecilia.
It’s then that she begins to slowly put it together.
She is Tsumuri. She is not Tsumuri. She can remember the GMs who played with her mind, and she can remember the taunts from the ones like Chirami.
And Cecilia.
They head out to the wild west. They don’t have budget for a Jyamato handler, yet. They don’t have budget to allow them to eat.
Black Tsumuri misses her chocolate chip melon pan. It tasted right, and it felt right…
Cecilia laughs, when she asks.
“Oh, silly girl,” she says. “You won’t have to worry about eating, soon. We’ll make you a real goddess… not that you aren’t empty already.”
Black Tsumuri bows.
“Yes,” she says. “Of course.”
She wants to scream. To tell her I’m not empty! It just hurts, so much. It hurts and I want to tear the world apart.
I’m pain. Pain and tears given human form—
She returns to her job.
She’s not empty, just tired.
Tsumuri remembers Ace like this: Ace is a weaving pattern in her mind, players across lifetimes. Some she liked more than others, Ace he was kind to her at even their earliest meeting. At the end of the day, they understand each other. They believe in the struggle and hope of the DGP and its players. They want to see happiness, to see better .
Black Tsumuri remembers Ace like this: lifetime after lifetime, there is one person who continues. Her heart grows and breaks as one for all of the players. He wished to make her his , and she hated it. Just like she said his name as she turned to stone and ripped apart all at once.
Killing him didn’t feel good because all she can feel is pain, but she pitied her other self.
She seems happy now, in the new DGP.
Black Tsumuri is not.
She’s been tortured her full life, but Samas is one of the only times she’s been hit. The Assistant turned Producer turned showrunner is constantly shaking and yelling. Overwhelmed, traumatized, and power hungry. When things go wrong, she screams, and she throws things.
Black Tsumuri wants to say it isn’t my fault. She wants to say but it is Cecilia’s .
She doesn’t.
They couldn’t risk the players or viewers seeing her bruised, so there were rules to protect her face.
Now, she exists in pain always. It doesn’t matter.
One day, Samas leaves a deep cut on her cheek. Black Tsumuri doesn’t bother to fix it.
A memory surfaces, of Ace.
“Your scar is gone.”
“Scar?”
“On your cheek… ah, just my imagination, I suppose.”
Tsumuri saw Ace as hope and safety. Black Tsumuri carries this memory as a reason to kill a man called Ace. It will not make her feel better.
She wishes she were empty. Empty is easier. Empty is safe. And when was she last safe? Never.
She refuses to sit anywhere, it reminds her of kneeling, chained. Of breaking until she cried and the pain made her into a person. It will turn her into less of a person, soon.
She wants to scream and cry and fall to her knees, to know that someone will catch her. She wants to talk about this pain.
But to everyone who sees her, she seems empty. It’s the only thing she can control, her only safety.
She is slowly becoming herself, and it’s the worst thing that ever happened to her.