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[crimsoncircle2]

CC ENDGAME STATEMENT

Hello, operatives:

As the fifth chapter of Crimson Circle comes to a close, we have an important update regarding the state of the game. At this time, the moderator team is choosing not to continue through endgame, and we will be concluding the roleplay on December 22nd.

We know this may come as a shock to some, but we wanted to be honest and underline that we’ve been dealing with a great deal of ingame issues throughout the course of the group. If you’ve ever taken notice of this and felt dissatisfied with your experience, we recognize this and apologize. We hope that everyone understands that this was not due to lack of effort — we in the mod team have been pushing past our limits dealing with a variety of issues with the group behind the scenes, but we can only push ourselves so far from the specific position we occupy. Please know that this decision was not made lightly, and we felt that ending here was the best and healthiest option for all of us.

For full transparency, the main reason for not moving forward with endgame is simply that we do not have enough power role material to present. There’s been a lack of development on the power role plot until now, and we’ve come to a point where it isn’t feasible to contrive something that would serve as a satisfactory ending to the game. We’ve been working with our power roles, Leviathan (Nightshade) and Ouroboros (Libra), to come up with an alternative solution — but ultimately, we couldn’t justify putting our players through a last-minute rewrite just to drag ourselves over the finish line. 

In addition, we’ve been struggling to keep up engagement with the MKG itself, due to a waning interest in very central mechanics (such as case investigations, map investigations, motives, and puzzles). Most importantly — while we're thankful to those who came forward, and feel honored to be part of your characters’ arcs — we had difficulty getting case volunteers in nearly every chapter, and murder cases are the essential building blocks of a mutual killing game. It’s been a challenge for us to understand what direction we should move the plot in when we’ve received minimal input on all of the core mechanics that drive it. 

Compounding all of the above, we’ve also been running the game as a two-person team after losing a moderator. This has been an immense workload to juggle between our other obligations and unforeseen offline circumstances, and our engagement has not always been taken seriously in return. This group has been a huge commitment for us in every way — and given the issues named above, we’re currently at the point where we cannot mentally or physically justify the input.

In light of all this, we want to stress once again that we believe this is the most responsible answer to this situation that we can provide. We’ve seen roleplays that might have ended on better terms had they been curbed at an earlier point, and we don’t believe it would be fair to anyone to force an ending we didn’t believe in for the sake of completion. While a number of alternative avenues were explored before we arrived at this conclusion, we strongly felt that none of them would have treated this group’s time and energy with the respect that it is our role to provide. As such, the two of us are confident in this decision to be honest with you and ourselves, and we hope to model a professional and clean break together with you all.

We understand there may be loose plot threads in your own individual character arcs, so we will remain open for threads until December 22nd at 17:00 EST. After this point, you are encouraged to reach out to your fellow players and close anything out that you need to in your DMs.

Thank you for all your time, interest, and participation up until now.

—The mod team, Dem and Ritz

[crimsoncircle2]

so, carry on | trial 5 | execution reaction | dmitri

Nona Blacklung, he had said, wanting Gia to grow as old and comfortable as she desired. There’s a glorious transition which occurs when the skin begins to sag and the muscle begin to pop out less, when the sun spots dapple and darken and lay down in patterns like a sailor’s back tattoo, taking him home. How he had hoped to still be visiting her when she was eighty and he was fifty, how it would feel to be as grown as Gia La Malfa was when she changed the course of his life forever, and by then, she would’ve stopped smoking. Nona Blacklung, oh, Nona Blacklung.

It’s not for him, he thinks, the words of sons to a man failed by parents at every corner, weighed down by the sacrifice they made for their children. His mother would say the same sometimes, whenever she was mad, whenever she felt old, or ugly, or wanted to be alone: Haven’t I sacrificed enough in this family? How she had, yes, she had given what was in her material means, the bread and the house and the water. It is not meant for him, but still Gia’s words reach out to his core as though they could absolve him. The tears don’t stop. They are soundless little things, hitting the floor and shattering like glass. In another time he may have offered himself up to trade, exchanged cogs in the wheel of sacrifice, but he had told Gia a commitment to living after over a decade of looking to die. A hundred times she would’ve smacked his hand away if he offered to exchange places. A hundred times, he would’ve felt a horrible, dirty coward.

When the execution begins, he is stunned still. It would be insult to try to pry open the doors for Shisa, and it would be sacrilege to, as one of the votes for her, tremble his lip, look away, or apologize. But Gia might catch something he leaves to the wind on his voice, there as he leaves her the last comfort he can, and perhaps the only thing he is now able to do for her:

I will see it through.

Then she’s off to die.

Dmitri, for once, raises the eyepatch off, squeezes it in the palm of his hand, and witnesses a demise with two of his eyes, as he does for his opponents in their earnest, final moments— a respect he only gave when completely alone, here, surpassing all barriers and boundaries of his conduct because it is for Gia. The stage presents him with a story of a what-if, a Gia La Malfa who became a boss in her own right, and dares to imply that she was a fruit of the same tainted tree his ilk derived from, destined to sow seeds that would rot the ground further. Her love, left to sea, swallowed by that legacy, and her son, now severing her to set himself free from that hellish yoke and mantle, to suggest that this, at her core, might be what it means to be Gia La Malfa as she sits in that very same spot, closes her eyes, and bleeds.

But it is not, and may he crack Leviathan’s jaw and split them down the middle for even so much as insinuating such a thing.

The Gia La Malfa who he knew came to him in spite of the ways he was gleeful and wild and obviously grieving, and never asked him to change, or hide his face, or stray from the path he was leading. She put down her gun and chose another path, one where she gives a young man chocolates and reconnects with a lover and around the world serves and host and guest and pillar. Her warmth was not of a fire, but perhaps a coal, an ember, kept in the pocket of a coat to keep the soul warm at the coldest, cruelest hour, a figure in the distance and the wind pushing you onwards. Gia La Malfa had loved, and lost, and found, and in every confident stride, in every smile and touch on the shoulder, she lived with the tenacity to show the world of discarded assassins that their world was not yet over.

Her time was up, and the change she championed, perhaps she always knew it would never be by her hands, bloodied with feuds, splattered by mothers and fathers taken before their proper ripe time. And perhaps she always knew she would join them, humoring Dmitri when he always counted just how much she had grown old when he counted her wrinkles and wanted to mark that she had passed one hundred. Perhaps at that bridge she wished he was eight and she was almost forty and she could have done something more besides break the bones in his body. There was no means to undo what had happened to the boy, but she set the man on a path that would at last open the eye he had closed to the world, the very path that would convince him to transform his scales into vines. They could never be family, but they were far from coworkers, delegates, master and apprentice, a relationship which would forever blur the lines of definition, but the depth of what was there was always felt, if not said. 

(In his own words, he would imagine it’s the love and forgiveness you wish you could give to your younger self. How you are so different from them now, how she and him were never quite the same, but he wanted to raise his head and ask her so many things about the future, and she could tell him about all the ways it would turn out okay.)

Around him brews vengeance, rotting in the air as it grows thick, stagnant, iron. A rage of revenge has birthed its own, and the cycle of scorn may continue yet again, held in the knives of two children and the breath of a man who slew his own father in turn, rage communal, collective, stemming from the young thousands in the world of assassins who killed for someone dead. He too could join them, calling for this to be solved all with Leviathan’s head— but for a moment, just an infinitesimal moment, it’s as though the islands themselves speak to him.

The crack in his face is where it all pours in. Grief delirium, maybe, a pain he swallows so deep down to prevent its bubbling that it takes him out of this moment to see the foundations upon which this place is built. He thinks of all the blood spilt so far, the bodies on the beach, lining up by the coast so that their blood trickles into the water as one red cloud. Perhaps he places Atticus’s mother there, and Gia’s father, her grandfather, and Shinichi’s parents, Arcadia there as well. Bodies upon bodies stack up by the coast, those he knows among them they have lost, and those beyond, the rising cascade of corpses from people he has no idea the validity of but knows must have died in the pursuit of all this, and suddenly each grain of sand is a grief of someone who once loved. A world not built on good deaths, or necessary ones. It was built on rage, and betrayal, and no hand with which to hold someone. He wonders if Gia, standing on this shore, knowing its truth, had to close her eyes when the noon light reflected off the water. Leviathan contents to burn it all down, leave them all messily afloat, and Ouroboros intends to build it better, stronger, arrange the bodies in the walls so they hold tight like a word in a throat. Neither of them, in his eyes, truly cares for those who died.

Dmitri is awash with guilt, and grief, and every emotion on the spectrum which makes him feel adrift. But unlike ever before in his life, even as his knees shake and his stomach churns, Dmitri Zakharchenko has a promise, a direction, and a future to build so others may go.

It was a world without legacies! A world where we don’t have to prove ourselves in tests that break us! A world where you don’t have to do what you’re doing right now…!

And he wants to cry to the beyond: What a beautiful world it is, Giovanya! I want to see it! I want to touch my forehead to its grass and kiss its dirt!

Some part of him alters, another metamorphosis of his self. Dmitri suspects he will never be Sasha again. That was the name a boy chose when he had nothing else. But for the sake of what she entrusted him with, he will become the man who can see that through. It hurts. It hurts. But he will rise above it, as he has again, and before.

Giovanya, Nona Blacklung, товарищ, тётя, woman like the sun, woman whom that wolf loved. I will not do it for you. I will do it for myself, and everyone, as you would give me the right to choose. Forgive me for what I have taken from you, this life, your world— but only do so after I have given enough back to the world, ten, hundred, thousand-fold.

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a warm place | strix | trial end

Whatever Ryo saw while she was plugged into the island's generator was undoubtedly beautiful -- Alizette doesn't doubt her words for a second. She believes every word of that final, broken message. And right now, more than anything, they wish they could see that beautiful world, even for a split second.

But they will not get to see the wonders of the universe today. They won't even come close. Instead, they will watch Gia La Malfa's execution. Instead, they will have to watch as Shinichi desperately tries, and fails to save her from said execution. They will get to watch their act of revenge on full display. They will leave this trial room satisfied, knowing they loved Ryo until the end.

No, that final thing, though... It isn't quite right. She sees Shinichi throw himself at the elevator door and something Gia said to her echoes in her mind:

"I don’t know if he mentioned it, but Shisa has asked me to be his guardian."

Her stomach churns. Her fingers twitch. Her jaw clenches.

"The way you described your time with Arcadia — it doesn’t sound perfect, but it does sound lovely."

Because they know that they cannot be satisfied. They never will be. What should be euphoria becomes a bitter taste in Alizette's mouth. Her content, owlish smile twists into a miserable frown, and this sight-- Gia's downfall-- Fills them with a strange and foreign feeling. It feels like grief. It feels like agony. It's... Despair?

Despair.

In killing Gia, she has become the very thing she sought to destroy. Alizette is no different from the grudge-carrying coworker who dared intrude on her home and dared to take her beloved father's life.

This realization becomes too much for Alizette to bear in silence. She feels helpless. Helpless to this strong emotion. It overtakes her, surging in like strong electricity, and causing tears to drip her face. And desperately, instead of accepting them -- She tries to stop them, because her immediate thought is that this means something is terribly wrong with her. They should not be crying. Not after what they just did. Not when they thought they were doing the right thing. They should be proud. They should be happy. They shouldn't care. Not when Gia was just someone she liked. 

But most importantly of all, they need to stop because no one else should see them crying. And so, desperately, they begin rubbing her hands and jacket sleeves over her eyes, but that isn't enough to bar such a strong feeling. Their tears do not cease to flow. They fall and fall and fall down their face... And Alizette realizes just how powerless she has become.

With their hands and sleeves proving useless, she figures that the next best thing is to flee the scene while she still can.

In one quick motion, in the split second between Gia's final breath and the projection shutting off, Alizette grabs her knife off the floor. Then, even quicker than that -- She leaves.

[crimsoncircle2]

CHILI CHOCOLATE || SUGAR

Paris has learned much about the word ‘family’ thus far. 

“Home is where your family is.” 

He's heard that phrase several times, enough that it had started to make sense. It was Gia, after all, who had took that abstract concept- a home- and gently patterned it into something tangible. In her eyes, he saw the reflection of the promised fireplace, soft light as warm and comfortable as being enveloped in that coat of hers. In her voice, the sound of a doorbell, spontaneous visits that could stretch for hours. On her hands, crumbs and flour, remnants of shared pastries from her favorite bakery. 

But there's another lesson about family to be learned. 

How fragile it is. 

Paris did not necessarily think of Gia as his mother. But she was, undoubtedly, a mother. What right did he have to imagine these things- to want them- when he cast that vote? It’s an easy thing to justify, protecting his own love and his own happiness, but it's this moment that finally makes him ask- 

Why is his happiness more important than anyone else's? 

Paris had long since operated on a modus operandi of selfishness. To take and steal and claw back everything that he had been denied in his life. To fill that emptiness with sweets and toys and all the things that made him happy, until he can finally say he's been satiated. A life well-lived. 

But never has he felt more full than when he repeated Gia’s promise under his breath, hands to his chest, doing his best to mimic the sincerity in her voice.

“Home is where your family is.” 

And at the end of it all, he's been left hungry. 

Paris doesn't bother sparing a glance to Shisa. No apology. No tears- not right now. He’d understand if the other man never wanted to see him again. 

(It was fun to imagine how they might have grown older together, and discovered their respective places in this big, big world and all the new experiences it offered. But that's all it was. Imagining.)

Wiping his face clean, Paris reaches in his pocket and curls his fingers around something solid. A prize, claimed in a better time. And he imagines again. 

He imagines using it on Leviathan. 

[crimsoncircle2]

Ill fated || Shisa

Shinichi wants to be brave for her.

When she moves to open those doors herself, he trails behind a few steps before forcing himself to stop. If she wants to leave with honor, he will at least grant her that.

He wants to, at least. He wants to.

But when the doors close and the hologram flickers to life, he feels himself sink once more.

"No...no no no..."

Her image appears on the screen and his resolve falls apart.

"No no no...please - !"

On pure instinct, he tears across the room and to the elevator doors, his hands desperately searching for a hold. But no matter how he pulls and strains, no matter how the metal groans from his efforts, it does not yield.

"Gia...! Gia! S-Someone help - !"

These are the same people that asked for her death, and yet, he can't help but to beg for their assistance. Whether anyone bothers to join him or not, he doesn't know. The only thing he can think about is getting to her. With no regard for his own safety, he releases his grip so he can ram himself against the door, painting his side in deep, red welts - ones that will soon darken into a macabre palette of blues and purples. He throws his broken body at the door as hard as he can, over and over, long after the projections dim and the only sound left is the sickening thud of flesh and bone against metal.

It's only after she's long gone that the doors finally creak open.

It's only then that he feels the throbbing pain in his shoulder, his ribs - the way his ragged breath stretches out every injured nerve in his body.

It's only then that it sinks in that he will never see Gia La Malfa again. And he feels a part of himself die with her.

[crimsoncircle2]

"IL CONTRAPASSO" // PANTHERA'S EXECUTION

♫♫♫

Today Gia is forty-eight again.

This is that baneful day, one whole decade ago: this is the day that she goes to kill the Boss.

She’s scaling his stronghold up to the roof. The command post’s spire is resined from the inside in carmine-red: a hundred-and-five stories of supertall skyscraper separated to shellac. Lashings of plasmodic varnish smear the walls at veins of impossible velocity, as though centrifuged by the wheeling hand of a colossus. Each floor is already dyed-and-carpeted in a precipitate of flesh and limb—

—as a killer in a white silk shirt splits open the penthouse office doors.

In six-point-nine seconds, a security detail of fifteen is stapled to the walls. Gia reloads with a stockwhip snap! and advances on the central desk, where the Boss waits with his fingers interlaced. Her heel drags a bloody chromosphere around the orbit-path of the room, until the gun's muzzle gapes at the back of his medulla. The Boss has always had a reputation for talking triggermen down, especially when he has them in line-of-sight; best not to take any chances, when he’s already bested her in another life.

“Non odi il circolo vizioso della vendetta?” He asks, at last — glances over his shoulder, like there isn’t a .454 waiting to burn through the gap in his jawbone. In a world other than this one, where a decade has already passed, she scabbards her pistol and laughs.

(In this world, with one paroxysm of her trigger-finger, Gia exorcizes her great regret.)

The Boss’ body floats face-down across his table, a waterborne object at perfect rest. She pauses, and buckles his wristwatch onto her bare right forearm. A bodyguard with a face so young Gia had held her fire watches from the corner, dead-eyed, twisting the stone charm on a weathered bracelet. When she leaves the room to say a prayer above the fallen, he has nowhere to follow except in her wake.

(An identity badge is pinned to the tether in his belt. The word printed there, on that workplace name-tag, is not even a name. It reads: Shisa.)

—

For the next two years, Gia leads the Circle’s remnants under her war-banner. In this world she still has the same dream: to end the crimson circle of legacy. All the assassin families are systematically razed to the ground — and if you ever meet her, it is on one edge of the boundless battlefield she claws out into this earth. With famed killers as her chevaliers and a stone-faced sentinel always at her side, the new Boss’ martial prowess dissipates into myth…

…Until one day, she is hunted by a wolf.

In this world, Atticus is already dead. One day he sailed out on a fishing-trawler with his mother Faol, and an emerald-eyed beast with a rust-soaked pelt crawled back to land. The same Scourge as before stayed to terrorize the eastern seaboard, butchering with a pair of axes unfettered. The same Scourge that challenges the Circle’s leader to a trial-by-combat today.

Atticus’ mother — the wolf — shambles forward on all fours, hatchets lacerating its path like a pair of skewing dewclaws. Even from a distance its gaze clamps down, jagged like glass, and stained with the green of scorched metallic salt. As they dogfight and dismount until blood mottles their mouths, just like thirty years ago, all Gia can taste is the acrid tang of Faol’s cigarettes.

The persistence-hunt ends in a pant, with less glory than exhaustion. Finally Gia can press the wolf’s back to the mat, and slowly press down its mask-muffled ululations. If she hadn’t waited to kill his mother years ago, Atticus could have found a family of his own. Vascular rage throbs through her at the thought: it has been for decades. She curls a dagger over the wolf’s heart, and bites down.

(The head of the mask sloughs back, as loose skin from a corpse does. Atticus Burke’s eyes stare back, just as bright-green as the glass that caged them.)

But the blade is already slipping through the guard-hairs of his coat — into the coil of a chain around his neck — between the splayed fingers of his ribcage. It seems to wield its own immersed weight, before she can beg for it back, as though enfolding down into the seabed.

Just as a floating body does in fluid, the knife displaces air skyward in one pneumothoracic wheeze. As Gia tries to call him back to land, Atticus has no words for her at all.

Instead he reaches for her left hand, to the place his mother’s wedding-ring never found. When he slips off the glove it’s bare, like nothing of this earth has touched it yet at all. She feels her hands ripping open the cloth at his bloody muzzle, scrambling for the thing still chained around his neck. Somewhere behind her, she thinks, Gia can still smell that awful, acrid smoke.

—

For the next eight years, the bodyguard at the Boss’ side remains a bodyguard. Without Atticus, she remains a beast caged in a coward’s pride.

The lion-cub stays silent most days, and never looks her directly in the eye. Gia continues to slaughter the world within these four walls, desperate to return to the place where he will call her something else. You watch her fell legions of Circle-insurgents faster than the holograms can sluice out their entrails. Until she escapes this execution, the whole world is something to be betrayed — and there is only one person left to whom she will ever turn her back, in an office, alone.

(A dagger breaches through the bulwark of her spine, lancing a single finger-crack into the vertebral arch. Gia turns her head, and lets the knife join her again.)

By the time she staggers against the wall, her shoulder-blades enclose a massive fissure of mortal lashings. The knife-carvings spread their arms and enclose toward her heart, too multitudinous to count. Shisa’s shadow eclipses her against the edge of the room, the hilt still clutched at a crescent-curl in his bloodless hand.

Gia slips to the ground slowly, her mass collapsing like a star doused in deep sea. As her palms tremors to catch his coat — to hold anything at all — something beneath her sleeve chimes in a weightless peal. When she stares down at her right wrist, there it is: a stone charm of a xiezhi, wound together with bright-red thread for luck.

That bracelet made for a child strains around the bulk of her wrist, doing everything it can to cling there for one more moment. Anchored to her left hand is the source of that heavenly ringing against rock: the gold wedding-band she’s been missing all along. She tilts her head to where she thinks the sky must be, and suddenly feels as though she might be floating.

In the world outside, Gia’s great regret had been hesitating to kill the Boss. But her greatest regret has always been making the ones who love her wait. Her life outside may have been filled with cruelties, but she would live it a thousand times over if it meant she could meet the ones she loves again.

She looks up at Shisa’s empty eyes and begs Shinichi: do you remember?

“In this world…” (...) “You never called me your…”

(...)

—

(Title-cards by Ritz; first art by Ritz; second art by Drelin, and third art by Ritz [with background by Dem].)

[crimsoncircle2]

VOCI DAL NULLA

Before she leaves, Gia tells Shinichi everything she can.

That she’s so proud he asked for her help, and that he tried to help Murphy until the last moment. That he should try not to dwell on what could have happened differently in that room, because Murphy left this world as a brilliant embodiment of her greatest passion therein. That he should stay alive to see the world at his own pace, even if he shouldn’t see the whole universe quite as quickly as she did. That he doesn’t have to forgive a single person on this earth, so long as he can forgive himself.

She tells him that there’s a letter to him from Atticus in her drawer, that she was going to give him the next time he doubted he could be truly loved by someone else. That she should give Shinichi Atticus’ wedding ring for him to offer someone else one day, if he likes, but she’d like to die wearing it. That the moment Shinichi asked if he could be her son, everything she has already became his, anyway. That if he wants to go to that house of hers and make it his own, her mother would like nothing more than to meet her grandson.

(Gia tells him that she loves him, and that she isn’t going to say goodbye. But if their souls separate here today, she’ll be at rest as long as she knows he isn’t coming to join her just yet.)

She lets him slide the bracelet onto her wrist, and joins him in the prayer that is not a farewell.

“...Amen.”

And for the fifth time since you first arrived, Jasper’s coils are expanding.

But they never finish growing gigantic. There is no subatomic snap of nanostructures, nor massive tessellations of chainmail scale. The energy-weapon flare in Jasper’s iris fades as a bulb-filament, as he looks to the entrance of the execution-chamber.

Gia is already there, the fingers of her unburnt palm wedged into the lacuna between elevator-doors. Grounding her weight in a low stance, she drags them open with one gigantic heave. There’s no need for Jasper to turn into armored-vehicle form, because she’s already a step away from walking into that place willingly.

(If Gia struggled against her fate here, Shinichi would try to help, wouldn’t he? And then Jasper would find a way to fill her life with more cruelty than taking it away. Still... she speaks not just to her son now, but to the entire room. To those that aren't here anymore, but fought for their lives with pride.)

“Please don’t think I’m giving up just yet. Perhaps this must be done…”

(...)

“...But I hate unnecessary sacrifices.”

Her head held high, Gia turns to enter the killing-grounds. As you watch the broad of her back advance, you are certain of one thing: she will slaughter the whole world if it means she can come back through those doors to him.

(...The lights dim, and Jasper’s eyes become a pair of searing photospheres. They’re beaming a film-reel onto the cave-wall.)

[crimsoncircle2]

A small prayer || Shisa || Trial 5.4 || For Gia

♫♫♫

Shisa pays no mind to whatever anyone else has to say to him. It's complete drivel - just background noise to the ringing in his ears. In fact, nothing in the room seems to register with him at all, not even the sound of his own voice crying for help from the recording. It seems like he might go back to what he used to be before this - that silent, stoic thing that offered only a blank stare from over the Boss's shoulder and nothing more.

That is, at least, until Gia turns him around, and he feels the prick of warmth seep into his flesh from her hand. He hears it - this isn't your fault - and his instinct is to deny it as furiously as he can. If he had been killed that day in his childhood home, perhaps he could have taken solace in the fact that he would lay at rest with his parents, sunken to the ocean floor where the warm ocean could keep them in its embrace. If he had been permitted to die that day after killing Boss, perhaps he could have left with a smile, knowing that he had finally taken back his life in his final moments. Perhaps things would be better, he thinks to himself. …but he knows it's not true.

Sons, she says, and despite everything, he feels his chest well up with pride. Yes, he's proud to be her son. And even if he could go back to the beginning, even if he had to subject himself to every tragedy in his life again, he would do it a hundred times over to be called her son again.

"I promise…I promise, Gia…"

His voice is weak and heavy with exhaustion as she picks his head up. And as when his eyes meet hers, he feels himself choke up again.

Say something. Say everything you need to before it's too late.

There's so much he wanted to tell her. More about his childhood, about the people he's come to care for - he wanted to ask her more of her life, of her time before they met, and of the people that she had cared for. He wanted to tell her about things that hadn't even happened yet. About how quiet the neighborhood was around her home, about the way it felt so odd to live somewhere with so many people after having lived alone all these years. How the leaves in the yard changed color in the autumn. How the breeze was so warm in the spring.

Things he will now never be able to tell her.

The only thing he does manage to say, as he rests his hands over the ones the cradle his face, is…

"Thank you…"

It's here that he reaches for her burnt hand - scarred and gnarled, but loved all the same - and removes something from his wrist to carefully slide onto hers.

Twenty years ago, his father had given him a bracelet in hopes that a part of him could continue to protect his child, even if he could no longer do it himself.

He wishes he could at least be there for her last moment. He wishes there was some way he could follow after her into that execution chamber so she wouldn't have to die alone.

That child has grown into a man now. There's no need for anyone to serve as his guardian - at least, not anymore. Not if it isn't Gia.

Shinichi has never believed in any god. But he has believed in the people who loved him, and so he finds himself murmuring a prayer as the beads lock into place around Gia's wrist.

"Mama, papa, stay with her, please…"

[crimsoncircle2]

Nothing more than that | Transgressor | Chapter 5 | Trial | RE: Trial Results, Panthera

Transgressor clicks his tongue at Panthera. The ugly part of him wants to deny her this simple request and keep arguing. Why should he listen to Ryo's murderer Panthera? Why should he remain respectful while he gets insulted by her accomplice son? Why do they get to say goodbye while the same priviledge was denied to him again? Why?

It's because in the back of his grief-stricken mind, he remembers how Panthera has given him a shoulder when he got injured by Mouser. He remembers how Shisa has always hurried to his side when he found him outside in his injured state, chiding him for not calling on him whenever he went out for a walk. Panthera, who has quietly offered the kind of support he desperately needed after his year long secret got out. Shisa, who didn't stop to continue worrying after he surprised him over at the crater lake.

It's because of these acts of kindnesses that he ultimately gnashes his teeth and redirects his anger to the podium for the time being - the crystal continues to crack underneath the immense force of his strength. Since the first crack, his hands have suffered cuts from the crystals which have broken out from the pressure, blood freely flowing down from said injuries, but the pain was neglible at best - outright ignored at worst.

At last, the votes were tallied and the result got announced - Ryo's murderer has been caught.

And the truth unfolds before their very eyes.

As it goes on, Transgressor couldn't help but ask again - why? Why didn't Ryo tell them? Why did Shisa have to stumble upon her? Why did Jasper have to overload and make her turn against Shisa involuntarily? Why was Panthera's first choice of action to immediately kill Ryo without even trying to help her?

(She didn't even try--)

His breath hitches when the makeshift spear pierced Ryo's chest. He sharply inhales when he sees her last words gracing the monitors. His breath stops altogether when he sees his name mentioned there.

(She's been calling for him and he hadn't heard it.)

"........... Ah--"

Suddenly, there was no strength left in him anymore. His hands go slack, slowly sliding off the podium, leaving trails of blood while doing so. The next words are barely above a whisper.

"... Why her? Why you?"

His vision became blurry and he's about to cover his face with his hands--

Only then does he noticed the state they're in.

And suddenly, something clicks. Something shifts.

(Of course.)

Transgressor feels like as if he had an epiphany. His bloodied hands told him something crucial, something he should've realized a long time ago.

These hands were never meant to protect anything.

In trying to protect everyone, he failed to protect what he held most dear. Meanwhile, Panthera has chosen to sacrifice someone else, but she succeeded in protecting the one who was most dear to her.

(Why hasn't he realized sooner?)

The tears never fall. Transgressor simply stands there in utter silence, an unreadable expression on his face now. If he cannot protect, then there is only one way forward now, isn't there?

(Even if it's his very core--)

(He should eliminate any excess.)

[crimsoncircle2]

KILL CAM #5.2

Electrical chaos converges on the platform, like a target-ring collapsing to the center of a reticule. Whole consoles sputter out great expulsions of scintilla as they detonate, then disperse into caustic smoke cloud. Even the visceral scrap of their insides is spraying vapor-thin: an illuminated supercell of flame, oxidized to a scalding lightning-blue. The air stalls with overstress smog—

—and a seven-foot sonic shock wave cleaves it in half.

Gia storms the bridgehead at the speed of a solar flare, both immaterial and gigantic in magnitude. When smoldering plastic sluices through the air at magmatic heat, she catches Murphy’s plasmatic volley with a sheet-metal shield kicked up with her foot. When a discharge of mains-current fireworks across the floor grates at Murphy’s will, she swings beneath the catwalk and loops around its belly in one acrobatic orbit. When a girder wide enough to sweep the whole walkway wheels down from its ceiling-struts, her front leg compresses to a spring-mass halfway through her stride — then she leaps to sprint atop the airborne beam. She mounts it as though she exerts her own gravitational pull — as though her three-hundred pounds somehow stall terminal velocity. By the time it collapses into the depths of the generator, she’s already a ripple in the air somewhere else. 

Murphy doesn’t register the presence as an individual anymore, her body felt so very light, so- she didn’t need to exert much effort, no need to do so for such easy destruction. Behind her the monitors flickered, words travelling through wires that the cameras cannot capture, too small, too far, the lenses struggled already, a sheen of melting plastic.

Despite the heat, the sparks dancing around the pair, the chasms where machinery once stood, mere feet away from Gia, something in Murphy is still here, if only for a moment. Murphy stares towards the entrance, towards Gia. Still smiling.

The final stretch toward the control-center is strewn with industrial cables, thicker than a person’s trunk, undulating in spasmodic jolts of their own power-load. Gia skids back on her sparking heel and flips towards the railings in a crack-crack of the negative space around her, her sights still locked as she twists in suspension and knees aside the hull of an entire console. Labyrinthine righting reflex grounds the knifepoint of her stiletto atop the one unbroken railing she can run along, and her eye fixes on Murphy trying to rip wires out of her head. The other eye is always somewhere else, somewhere higher.

(There is no particular notion of heroism going through her mind, as she primes her chevalier’s spearing-arm. That’s her wife, who threw himself on the cross to spare her and her son so that she could take him to the house Atticus would never see. In the grand scheme of things, if she wanted to be a hero too, Gia’s tactical inclination would be to let the other woman burn their captor’s generator to a husk.

But there’s one problem: it’s Shisa. And if Shisa wants to live, Murphy is going to have to die.)

"Amore mio," she murmurs, quiet enough for only the camera and the spirits to grasp onto. "Guide this hand of mine one more time, won't you?"

The edges of the camera feed sizzle, an interference of pink and orange, bleeding onto the video, corrupting it with the same light that the room has become basked in. Murphy, now, stands alone upon the console, silent, smiling, all you can make out bar her jittering silhouette, is a pair of wide, silver eyes.

Gia steps closer, the heft of each stride weighted with intent, and the chaos almost seems to fold back around the shape of her. The blackened ground that encircles them now sizzles in almost volcanic spume. As she walks, a fallen railing with a warning-tape pattern clatters under her boot; she bends, slowly, to take it in her right hand.

She winds up, and lances it through the gap in Murphy’s ribs. It erupts through the rhomboid tissue of a television-screen, five feet behind her.

“Mea culpa, darling,” Gia says, and watches her head wilt toward the ground. Those axon-fiber wires drag down with her, her mediastinum still gripping the spear-wound too tight for her body to follow, now almost weightless somewhere else. The screens at Murphy’s back are still sprayed in hot-pink noise. It almost looks like the color of happiness.

(The metal lightning-rod has scorched a stripe from Murphy into her, through her glove, into the fat of her hand. When she opens her palm to release it to the ground, it falls with a clink! five seconds later.)

Burning into the monitors behind her, in such an infinitesimally small time, the time it took for her heart to explode. Letters so bright they would bring pain in themselves. The world melted around her, so bright, so- she could hear and- a voice- and-

SOVERY████████BEA█TIFULEVERYKI██OFCOLOUR█OHLIZ█████OSHIWHERE██INEED█████AINFULAMI█████████INEEDYO████████PLEASESEEWHATI██AND██URAANDMAY██████████XANN███AN███MITRISEEWHATICAN█████HURTS██AN████SOBRIGHTSO██████ELIAIIT█SEVERYTHING█████WHATSH███████████████INEEDTO████SHOW███T████████YOUITS█BEAUTIFUL███EVENIFITSNOTCOMPLETE ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

The body spasms slightly as the words flash before dying eyes, mouth attempting vainly to open, stilling in amongst those smoking neon lights.

And in that brief, beautiful moment, Ryo Shimizu saw the universe.

[crimsoncircle2]

KILL CAM #5.1

(The recording begins…)

Rough hands fumbling with cables, papers spread out ahead of her in a haphazard map only she could understand. Raw data filtered through Murphy's brain, her face aglow with the light emanating from dozens of monitors surrounding her. 

Murphy had never been one to preserve her own safety. It'd been selfish, maybe, to not share her findings ahead of time, to avoid telling everyone what she’d just found. Plans. They’d all see soon, and it would be a great surprise. She’d sat in the sunshine for a brief moment before her descent, fingers tapping away at her communicator, communicating with everyone here, with everything here.

And now, Murphy wasn’t alone.

“M-Murphy?” A familiar silhouette enters from the edge of the screen, cautious in its approach. The man you recognize as Shisa stares around the room before his focus lands back on the control center. “What are you doing here by yourself?” 

(And the tip of a single angle-bracket tongues out in the command line, right as she turns her head to him.)

Attempting to start CC:/TCG-V\system-32\overload/exe as user “JASPER”...

Murphy swiveled around, eyes locked on target. "Ah! Shisa?", her voice came out a squeak. The monitors began to flicker. She tilted her head, smiling. "Um! Well I didn't expect company down here! Too, um, too risky and all! I’ll tell everyone in a bit, I wanted it to- to, um, to be a fun surprise! Too- too- Shisa?” Like a scream in the distance, she heard Shisa.

She stops, and a console behind her explodes.

Murphy doesn't react, not as shrapnel threatens to tear through them both, not as something near-grazes her head, singing the carnation behind one ear. She stares through Shisa, as if he were both as insignificant as a bug, and a target to be eliminated. Her smile melted. 

“What are you? I-”, she stood up, stumbling towards Shisa, voice distant. “I- what are you? Who are you?” 

Murphy was transfixed upon something Shisa couldn’t see. Beautiful glowing pinks, warm oranges and vibrant reds. Heating up, flesh turning to steel and plastic. An expanding spider’s web of pain. Murphy didn’t realise she was screaming. An agonised grin split her face in two.

“I need to- I need to show!”

Why did she feel such a way? What was the thing ahead of her? Wires connecting her mind to the world dissolved into flesh. What was once a human ahead of her was now mere data, now something trying to stop her, now something trying to destroy her. She needed to show herself. Murphy’s eyes rolled back for a moment, her mind captivated by the digital sinews and organs of this place. The body shudders. Pain coursing through individual axons as if floodgates had been torn asunder by the tides. Right now, Murphy could only sense a threat, sense-

“You.”

Murphy froze in place, muscles tensed, unseeing. She wasn’t there anymore. Cables collapse from the ceiling, spasming violently across ferrous grids, sparks fly from electronics, a foul, acrid stench of burning plastic, before they too exploded. Her body doesn’t react, not with an automatic flinch or a joyous smile. Transfixed, transfixed on destroying anything, everything. Everything.

Nothing would survive unscathed.

Shisa narrowly dodges a sudden spark from behind him, scrambling to make his way to safety around the other side of the console. He raises his arms over his head, trying in vain to block the searing heat away from eyes as he searches for something in the room that can help him. But as he looks back behind him at the catwalk cloaked in destruction, his expression drops.

Attempting to escape through the way he came in would be a death wish. He’s trapped.

“You have to stop - please!” 

Murphy laughs, that uncomfortable, agonised laugh that she did when she hurt. Flames begin to lick the floor, the kind that cannot be put out by mere chance. Bruises had bloomed from inside her head, burns mixing with the callouses on her hands, the body became singed. She- 

“Stop? Stop? What? I- Am I-”

She would bring the world down upon herself, and she wanted to feel every single bit of it. Scrambling up onto the console, grabbing onto cables dripping to liquid, tighter as the pain seared through her hands. Behind her, screens flashed words that she couldn’t express, not in life, not the way that she’d always wanted to. 

Were she still coherent, Murphy would find this so very enthralling.

Shisa frantically taps at his communicator as he retreats, but the face remains dark and he looks about the room for an alternative - the outer consoles. He types as fast as he can, only barely finishing his message before he’s forced to dart away from the now sparking machines. Before he leaves, he makes one last desperate attempt to call out to her -

“Murphy!” 

-  but he knows it’s hopeless. With nowhere else to go, he makes a break for the insulated platform, gritting his teeth as the heat of the electrical fires scald the soles of his shoes. He lands clumsily once he gets to the platform, leaving behind a familiar yellow-orange streak as he does so.

The errant bursts of electricity no longer threaten to arc up through Shisa’s spine, in this one rubber-floored foothold. Here’s the only problem: he’s trapped. The bulkheads of the island’s nerve-center are desiccating back in the flames to reveal gigantic dendrites of raw live wire, and the detonations they set off are zeroing in on his flanking-tower. In mere seconds his last bastion is surrounded by a scarlet ring of flame, lapping at the mechanical ramparts that could ignite the whole structure in an instant.

But a shape swells from the chamber’s entrance: a supermassive sunspot that distends its flame-warped shadow down the path. There’s the frame of a person, unmistakable, radiating penumbral mane in silhouette to the height of the rafters. Eyes that swallow light by day now flash through the smoke, toward the platform, toward her son.

(Shisa’s voice can barely be heard over the mechanical cacophony in the room, and yet, the words are so clear.)

“Gia! Gia, help!”

She drops her shoulders, and tears across the metal bridge.

[crimsoncircle2]

TRIAL RESULTS #5

Your holographic screen dissipates — to be replaced by the final tally. And at the very bottom…

[ LOTUS — 1 ] [ ROXANNE — 2 ] [ SHISA — 1 ] [ PANTHERA — 7 ]

[ MURPHY’S KILLER RECEIVED THE MAJORITY VOTE. ]

The holographic portraits spin in a circle around you, containing each person in a dizzying roulette-wheel of space. For a moment you are all isolated, the dead eyes of your fellow killers piercing you in a crystal-red laserbeam.

The portraits stop revolving, and roll to a placid stop. 

[ THE TRUE KILLER OF MURPHY WAS: PANTHERA. ]

(...)

And just like two trials ago: the lights switch off. This is your reward for voting right: to see the truth with your own eyes.

[crimsoncircle2]

we're still here, can you hear me? | strix | trial 5.6 | re: panthera, shisa

The instant they catch a glimpse of the orange petals clinging onto Shisa's shoes, Strix locks in her vote. Their hand moves before their mind can fully comprehend anything, almost like they don't need to stop and think -- To consider the ramifications of what her vote will do. They don't deliberate or weigh the odds like they did in the past trials. The orange flowers are the answer. They are the smoking gun that Panthera spoke of. They are the key to solving Ryo's murder.

They feel a weight fall from their shoulders when they enter Panthera's name. Their hand steadies. Their blade falls to the ground with a clatter. They lean onto their podium for support. They gasp for air. They can breathe.

But unlike the other times in their life when they've enacted revenge, something doesn't feel right.

"You’re sure you don’t want revenge? I wouldn’t blame you if you took it out on me."

"I don't need it."

"You don’t need it."

It doesn't feel good.

Transgressor gets angry. Shisa runs to Gia's side. The people around them talk and cry and vote but...

What will they, the person who swore to kill Ryo's killer, do?

Strix is quiet. Not unusual for them, but it's unusual for this trial. It's not how they expected to feel. That's the unusual thing.

"No... I wouldn't leave everyone here."

Because... This isn't what Ryo would have wanted.

Gia looks to Alizette in acknowledgement, and all they can offer in response is a solemn nod as they avert their eyes from what happens next.

[crimsoncircle2]

Gia won't let Shisa down in this last way, by refusing to fight for her life. She casts her vote for Roxanne, the original runner-up.

VOTE COUNT: Lotus — 1 Shisa — 1 Roxanne — 2 Panthera — 7

[crimsoncircle2]

CON DISPERATA GIOIA // PANTHERA // 5.3 // RE: ALL

Truth be told, she understands that Shisa’s reaction would probably be different to Transgressor’s. That was the problem. When he was eight years old and his parents’ killer extended a hand, Shisa took it, and turned his head to the sky. The desperation that trenched a knife in the Boss’ back was always a distant stem-cutting from the grief that never grew. Faces that twist from the light in the memory of a child.

Shisa had known for twenty years that the Boss took his family. When he finally clawed something back from him, it hadn’t been a vengeance for them. If rage had ever been given the space to take root, perhaps it would have blossomed that day in bright-red. But Shisa has always worried her precisely because he doesn’t express these things — because he’s never been given the chance to.

So when he takes that gorgeous risk of expressing himself now, Shisa may be afraid to look back at Gia. But when he does, all he will see is pride etched into her face. He’s come so far since that tongue-tied boy that tethered himself to a man’s shadow, unable to even look her in the eye. His desperate fury, if he gives it a voice, is still a sound she’s quite relieved to hear. And it will always sadden her less than that terrible, terrible silence.

“Transgressor, do you think this conversation could wait?”

Gia’s tone remains pleasant, if somewhat immovable. Jasper is sure to offer more reliable closure than theirs on the death of Murphy very soon, and she can’t help but feel responsible to end Transgressor’s admonishment before it goes somewhere that can’t be taken back.

“We’re on borrowed time right now, so I’m going to cut these remonstrations short.”

Here she turns to the rest of the room. Her unburnt hand is already set on Shisa’s shoulder, rubbing a warm groove there until he can gather himself to speak. She’s quite clearly not angry at Paris or the other six votes for Panthera, nor does she thank Cecille and An for fighting against the majority. Everyone has their own choice to make peace with, and she refuses to take it from them by claiming it’s for her.

Voting differences aside, there’s one thing that they all seem to have in common: a profound unsettlement that they’ve let themselves get so close to anyone at all.

“Dmitri, Paris, Roxanne, Libra, Maya… I sense that you’re still uncomfortable with your choice. Not the choice to kill me, precisely, but the choice to open yourself to other people. I can’t be the one to offer you forgiveness, but I understand what it means even to kill for love.” (...) “So hold your heads up high and trust in your choice. And accept the consequences.”

(Of love.)

Out of the same understanding, she doesn’t include Strix in this address. Whatever parting judgment Strix makes today about this gorgeous, awful feeling cannot come from Gia La Malfa. What she offers them is a look of acknowledgement, from which they can take or discard whatever they’d like.

As quickly as she can, Gia does what she’s been waiting to do: she turns back to Shinichi, her full frame eclipsing him easily from the scrutiny of the room. So this is what it means to lose a love from the other side, in a place like this. Perhaps this is how Atticus felt: a crimson circle of pre-emptive absence lodged in his torso, just a little lower than the same one she lanced into Ryo Shimizu. Even as she prepares to leave Shinichi, she can hold her head up high knowing that she is enjoining with a sacrifice that means everything.

(After all, Atticus left this world with one treasure: the smallest seed of hope that dying in the way he did would keep Gia and Shinichi safe. Even if she’s been forced to break half that promise, she can greet him knowing that the other half has been sanctified. There is an inheritance of meaning there, first left to her by her wife and which she can now leave to her son. If Gia knew before that the universe contained such sublime wonders, she would never have waited decades for anything at all.)

“Shinichi, this isn’t your fault.”

(If he regrets asking for help, now is the time to put that to rest. That tug on her coat-sleeve still pulls somewhere deeper, somewhere inside her ribcage. Gia dips her head low to him as though following some unseen force, speaking so quiet it is more an echo from her chest than mere words.)

“I don’t want to insult you by even saying it’s my fault, because…”

(...)

“I was so happy you reached out to me. This world may not be fair, but the world where you let me abandon you isn’t one worth living in to begin with.”

(Despite all the ways in which she is worried and furious for Shinichi’s sake, there’s no regret in Gia’s heart. This death, so easily averted by the nine killers around them, could feel meaningless if she didn’t refuse to let it be so. Assassins — human beings — can be taken from this world in an instant. Few of them are fortunate enough to leave it with the opportunities to tell their families how loved they are.)

“...Wherever you choose to go next, can I ask you to remember something for me? Sons shouldn’t feel responsible for their parents’ choices. Not even what they do out of love.”

(So she takes his face in her aching palms, and wills him to spread his arms to the sun.)

[crimsoncircle2]

Helpless | Lotus | Trial 5.3 | RE: Like the last 5 people dawg

Ah. In a way, this all made sense now.

He couldn't fully bring himself to believe Roxanne was the culprit. Perhaps it was another case of his ever bleeding heart getting the best of him, but he didn't want to believe she would shed tears over Ryo only to have killed her in the same breath.

But Panthera and Shisa? Well, as much as it hurt and ached, no matter how much he wished it could be anyone else, that he could believe.

"Please, we shouldn't-- this isn't…!"

The words die in his throat, choked out into nothing as all he can do is watch. What could he even do in this situation? It was cruel, unfair. An didn't want to make this vote, didn't want to listen to the others fight or have any of this to have happened in the first place.

And yet even with hearing Transgressor's anger and grief, Shisa's defeated tone, An still can't bring himself to vote for Panthera. When he thinks about it, his hands tremble. A memory of a pair cozied up next to a warm fire and warmer drinks drifts across his mind. Comforting words and concerned looks.

He just couldn't do it. Not when Shin was right there, clinging to the sleeve of Gia's coat.

Unconsciously, An finds himself moving closer, but not too close. Far away enough to not be crowding or suffocating, but nearby to quietly offer his support. His vote ends up defaulting in the end as he wanders away from his podium. He would have never had the strength to press that button anyway.

It's times like these, where An's chest aches and throbs at the fear of losing yet another person, does a small part of him wish he never got on that plane and met anyone here to begin with.

[crimsoncircle2]

Shisa doesn’t move from Gia’s side. His vote defaults.

VOTE COUNT: Lotus — 1 Shisa — 1 Roxanne — 1 Panthera — 7