Occultic;Nine Volume 2
Page 9
She looked at the phone with the stern expression she never let me see.
“Hmm... It’s definitely not a ghost photo, I can say that.” She stared at it for a while and then smiled a bit.
“It’s the last picture that Chi sent me. You see that weird white light, right?” I’d shown it to Toko because she was an editor at Mumuu and supposedly had a strong sixth sense.
“I think this is just light bouncing off a cell phone strap or something.”
“I see...” I felt a little better hearing that, so that was good. But now my clue was gone.
“But... I feel a little better.” Toko put the phone on the table, still smiling, and said something strange.
“You feel better?”
“Yeah. That’s right. About your friend Chi... If there’s one thing I can say...”
“...”
“She’s still alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“If the photo you just showed me really is a clue about Chi, I don’t feel any waves of the dead coming from it. You know, I can tell these things.”
“Y-Yeah...” Her words made me so happy that I teared up a little.
“So you need to keep a hold of yourself, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, by the way, Miyuu.” When we left the café, Toko turned to me as if she’d remembered something. “Have you been meeting with that guy from Kirikiri Basara lately?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” I nodded, and Toko adjusted her glasses. The light from the streetlamp flashed off them for a second... or so I thought.
How did Toko know about that? Had she seen the article about me that Gamo had made?
“What’s he like?”
“What’s he like...?” I never thought she’d take an interest in Gamo. Was it okay to tell the truth...?
“He’s kind of a loser. Not the type I’d want as a boyfriend.”
Gamo, I’m sorry.
“Does he seem dangerous?”
“Oh, no, not like that. Not at all. Really. Gamo is... Oh, his name is Yuta Gamon. He’s a pervert.”
“There’s lots of perverts in my editorial office, so I’m used to them.” Toko started to walk towards the station. As she walked, she asked me about Gamo’s age and what he did for a living, and while I hesitated, I answered her.
Eventually she crossed her arms, as if lost in thought, and then pulled me to the side of the street. She stared right into my eyes with a serious look.
“Listen, Miyuu. Can you introduce me to this Gamon kid sometime soon?”
“Huh?”
“He might have something to do with some private research I’m doing.”
“Huh? Really? Did he do something wrong?”
“Oh, no. It’s not like that. But it feels like a lot of important information goes up on that Kirikiri Basara site of his. I want to talk to him.”
“Oh, okay. I’m sure it’s fine.” Gamo would probably break down in tears of joy if he heard an editor from Mumuu wanted to talk to him. At least, he certainly wouldn’t turn her down.
“Sorry, I know I shouldn’t be asking you things.”
I said goodbye to Toko in front of the station and started to walk home.
The instant I was alone, I heard a spooky song from my bag, one you might hear in a suspense movie. This was the melody I used when I got a call from a number not on my contacts list.
I quickly took my phone out of my bag, and sure enough, it was a number I didn’t recognize.
“Chi?!” I answered the phone without even thinking about it.
“...”
“Hello?! Is that you, Chi?!”
“...” They said nothing, but I could hear them breathing.
“Hello?! Chi? It’s you, right?” I screamed into the phone.
And then...
“Um... no.” The voice that replied wasn’t Chi’s. It belonged to a man.
I was so disappointed I wanted to hang up. But...
“I want to talk to you about my dad.”
“Who are you...?”
“Sarai. We talked on your livestreaming program, remember?”
“...!” My heart skipped a beat.
Yeah, I remembered. I’d talked to him on my Nicco-Nico Live Fortune-Telling Program a month or so ago.
Gamo had said he was a Basariter, a regular on Kirikiri Basara. He’d pretended to have a question and called in just to humiliate me, but the vision I’d seen was so painful and shocking that I’d cried.
—There’s things you want to say to your dad, right? Now’s your only chance! If you don’t do it right away, you’ll super regret it!
That’s what I’d said.
And after that, his dad had died. I hadn’t been able to speak when I’d seen it on the news. I’d felt a pain in my heart. If I hadn’t told his fortune, maybe his dad would’ve survived.
“Sarai... Hashigami, right?” I knew his name because I’d seen it in the vision.
“...That’s right.” He didn’t seem surprised that I’d guessed his name.
But how did he know this number? The phone number I’d used for my Nico broadcasts was for a different phone that I didn’t usually use.
“Oh, I see. You’ve gone silent for more than a second because you’re wondering how I got your private cell phone number, right? It’s simple.”
He felt like another person who’d be a pain in the butt, in a completely different way than Gamo.
“My father was on TV several times. One of the producers from a show he did came to the funeral. And that producer introduced me to the director of the program you’d appeared on.”
Did he mean Don’t Miss It! POM!?! The world was a smaller place than it looked.
“So you watched the program I was on?”
“No... I googled it.”
I-I see. So he didn’t know everything, then.
“So... what do you want me to do?”
“Can we meet somewhere?” Sarai said he wanted to talk about his dad.
I remembered the vision I’d seen during my broadcast. It was so noisy that I could only understand fragments of it, and I’d been under so much stress that I think I mixed a lot of it up with memories of my own dad.
Would I be able to answer his questions? Regardless, I felt like I had to talk to him.
“...Alright.”
site 40: Yuta Gamon
“...And so the NEET God thinks that this isn’t mass hypnosis, it was a suicide meeting, instead. What do you think, Basariters?” I danced my fingers lightly across the keys, then made a beautiful landing on the enter key to upload my newest article. “Whew. It’s been a long time since I uploaded a masterpiece like this.”
I’d decided to try uploading my theory about the deaths in Inokashira Park, AKA the 256 incident, to Kirikiri Basara. Normally, I never uploaded articles just containing my own thoughts. I’d just give out a link to an existing site, add in some inflammatory comments in my role as “NEET God,” and then just let things go where they may. That was enough to get the Basariters to start arguing on their own.
“Poyaya? But then why did you decide to make your own ‘amazing idea’ into an article this time?”
“You wanna know why, Ryotasu? You want me to tell you?”
“Yup. I wanna know why!” Ryotasu nodded as she pointed the Poyaya Gun at me.
I wish she wouldn’t point that thing at people while she was talking to them. It wasn’t a toy. It had incredible electrical power. It was actually a lot more dangerous than your standard air gun.
What idiot gave something so dangerous to a ditzy airhead like her?
“The reason I put my thoughts into an article... was as a warning about the direction the general conversation is going.” I grinned.
“A warning? What does that mean?”
“I think we need one. The way Japan’s public opinion works, if one person turns right, there’s a tendency for everybody else to turn right, too. Everybody wants to fit in. I’m trying say that we need t
o think about this occult boom that’s going on.”
“Gamota, that doesn’t make sense.” Master Izumin was standing on the other side of the counter listening to me, and he interrupted my conversation like always. “That internet thing you do deals with the occult, right?”
I didn’t know how old Master was, but anybody from the generations before computers had a tendency to call anything done on a laptop “doing an internet thing.”
Well, I was doing an internet thing, so I decided not to bring it up.
“I’m the admin of an occult aggregator blog. But that’s just to get affiliate money. It doesn’t have to be the occult, as long as I can make money off it.”
“But doesn’t that mean an occult boom is good for you? It means people will be more interested.”
“KiriBasa is filled with people who hate the occult. It’s nice that everybody’s getting excited over it, but the whole point of the site is to feel superior by mocking idiots who believe in the occult. Of course, if the occult is popular, that means the debates will get more heated, and I’ll get more hits, so of course I welcome it.” I tried to look smug as I said it, but Ryotasu poked me in the side and ruined the effect. It made me feel ticklish, so I giggled.
“Jack! Jack!”
“Wh-What? Ryotasu, don’t poke me. What’s ‘jack’?”
“Jack! Jack! Gamotan’s a jerky Jack!”
Oh, right. Maybe I am.
The more the Basariters and occult fans engaged in useless debates, the better off I was.
Anyway, I needed this article to get Kirikiri Basara active again. Not being able to upload any articles during the week I was in hiding had hurt me. The other aggregator sites had caught this big wave, and I was falling behind. At this rate, instead of being able to make a living off an affiliate site, I’d wind up a third-rate site that nobody visited.
“Anyway, that Inokashira incident is full of mysteries, huh?” Master Izumin shivered a little with his muscle-bound body. “When I’m at home I cling to the TV following the latest updates, but there’s really nothing. I think that means the cops don’t know, either. It’s scary. What if I get sucked into the lake too?”
I looked a little on the internet too, and everybody was still talking about the 256 incident over the past few days.
“Proposal to Drain Inokashira Lake and Conduct a Full Investigation”
“Why Are They Still Having Trouble Identifying the 256?”
“Time of Death for All Fatalities Was Between 9:00 PM the Night Before and 4:00 AM”
“Prime Minister Expresses His Condolences to the Victims of the 256 Incident”
“Public Safety Finds No Evidence of Cult Involvement”
“No Sign of Poison Gas; Theories of Mass Hypnosis Gain Strength”
“Media Wars Heating, Local Residents Complain”
“Inokashira Park Closed Indefinitely Until Investigation Complete”
There were headlines like that everywhere.
The latest hot topic was that no one was sure why it was taking so long to ID the bodies. Most of them had died from drowning, and less than twenty-four hours had passed between their deaths and the time of discovery, so the damage to the bodies was almost zero. But the police still had only been able to ID fewer than half. They were dodging the media’s questions about why.
And the conspiracy theorists had leapt on that.
As a result, the online debate only got bigger, and now you were seeing occult theories everywhere. Both the media and the internet were ignoring everything else to talk about this.
...The whole world had forgotten about Dr. Hashigami’s death.
If the cops were putting all they had into the 256 incident, that meant they’d be putting less energy into finding Dr. Hashigami’s killer. Maybe nobody would realize that I was at the crime scene. But that also meant there was less of a chance that the real killer would ever be found. It also meant that I wasn’t going to have a chance to prove my innocence.
My fear of an invisible enemy was growing stronger by the day.
I thought about contacting this Ririka Nishizono person, or maybe telling the police, but that would mean identifying myself, so I’d hesitated.
Suddenly the door chime rang, and somebody came into the café. Was it the police?! I almost leapt out of my chair. But it was just Myu-Pom.
Don’t scare me like that...
“Hello.”
“Oh, Myu. Did you get in touch with your friend?”
“Oh, no.” Myu-Pom smiled weakly at Master Izumin and then came over to me. “Hi, Gamo.”
“Oh, yeah. Hi. It’s rare to see you here on a Saturday.”
“Um...” She looked like she wanted to say something.
What could it be? A confession of love? No, that couldn’t be it. Then... did she want to quit Kirikiri Basara? Or maybe...
“Is this about that Myu-Pom special we were going to run on the site? Sorry, I’m too busy with the 256 incident. And if we wanted to do a special we’d have to do a bunch of prep work, right? So wait a while on that.”
“...” Myu-Pom looked at me desperately. But in the end—
“No. I understand.” That was all she said, and then she went over to Ryotasu.
What was that about? I was interested now. I couldn’t figure out what girls were thinking. Maybe I should try to make her feel better by telling her we’d do an interview and put a special together sometime soon.
As I wondered about that, I looked at the other article I’d uploaded. There should be comments by now.
I wonder how many comments were posted. If it was just trolls, I’d probably want to kill myself.
There were about ten comments on the article. All of them were posted immediately after my upload, and they all said things like, “Sure, yeah,” and, “Too long. Tell me in three lines,” or, “Shut up, moron.”
I want to kill myself...
“Maybe I should wait a little longer...” If Sarai showed up, the debate would get a little more heated.
Since I hadn’t uploaded anything for a while, my regular commenters had disappeared. That might be one of the reasons that my more recent comments were trending more towards the occult.
I sighed and went to close the PC. But then I remembered the comment from “Hello there, I’m Zenigata.” about Ririka Nishizono. That was a new comment on an old article. Which meant that maybe the other old articles had new comments on them, too.
I looked at the comment list. I could see that last month’s articles on One-Man Hide-and-Seek and the Curse of Kokkuri-san had a decent amount of new comments over the past few days.
“The Curse of Kokkuri-san Is Seriously Terrifying!”
259: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
Hey, you know how they’ve announced the names of the people they ID’d from the Inokashira Park incident? One of them’s got the same name as the chick from this article.
260: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
>>259
Lolwut?
261: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
>>259
How come you know the girl’s name? Was it leaked somewhere?
262: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
>>261
Check the backlog. Basara found her. The name of the school and “around fall” were enough to ID her. They checked the news from that period, and found something that matched.
263: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
>>At around 7:00 PM on October 13th, a second-year student at Kichijoji Girls’ High, Yuna Miyamae (16), collapsed while at school and was taken via ambulance to the hospital. According to reports, she and her friends were doing the “Kokkuri-san” ritual in her classroom. Doctors at Musashino Medical General Hospital say that the cause may have been stress-induced anemia. But is that really all it was?
I found this article in Tokyo Sports, lol
It’s really got her name. And it sure sounds like a match, right?
264: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
265: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
No! Not Yuna! She’s our idol!
266: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
Are you serious... Are you SERIOUS??
267: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
I found an article from March 1st. The media was so busy talking about the Inokashira incident that it got lost, but here it is.
“Patient at Musashino Medical Escapes, Whereabouts Still Unknown”
At around 11:00 PM on February 29th, staff at Musashino Medical General Hospital reported that a patient had gone missing. The missing patient was Yuna Miyamae, a resident of the psychiatric ward.
The police searched, but have not found her. Since her clothes were still in her room, it is believed she left wearing a medical gown.
268: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
Wow, I seriously didn’t see that.
269: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
I found her name on the Inokashira victims list, too.
270: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
Then she ran from the hospital and killed herself at Inokashira Park? Did she go straight there, or meet with someone first? If you could track where she went, wouldn’t they be able to prove whether or not there was group hypnosis?
271: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
Yuna... rest in peace.
272: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
Was there time for this girl to be hypnotized? I mean, she walked from the hospital to Inokashira, right? There just wasn’t enough time for her to sit around and be hypnotized.
273: Anonymous is Seriously Scary
It was friggin’ cold out, and the middle of the night, and she was a hospital patient (even if it was just in the psych ward). On top of that, she walked a long way in a hospital gown. She’d be in pretty weak shape, right? Wouldn’t that just make her easier to hypnotize?