[ARC 1: SCOURGE OVER URASARIA]
Rita Kuznetsov is dead.
This sentence is separated from all that is to come because all that is to come is a result of this statement. It is a fact, and it is of reality.
More important to this novel, however, is perception. Perception is a separate beast from reality, the former almost the entirety of human experience, and the latter brief slices of objective existence only occasionally accessible to ourselves. Through the imposition of our senses upon reality, we filter it into a more palatable form to ourselves as creatures of thought, and name this a reality, into which we invest what we consider the most vital parts of ourselves. Stated differently, the traits of objective existence are not as important as the thoughts, fantasies, emotions, and memories that they trigger in their observers.
What arises then is the flaw of perception, which is not what is overlooked or forgotten, but what is created or imbued. The strength of this gaze overpowers the reality of past events by the distortion that is memory. It inverts internal habits of thought outward into what we call interpretations or predictions, atmospheres of our perceived existences. We as observers become monoliths of past moments made to interpret fresh events, yet are unable to reinvent ourselves without sundering what we consider to be existence itself, for we have invested into our perception what we call reality.
What is not subjective is that Rita Kuznetsov is dead. She had been dead for five years, as she had been killed in 2013. She was not a particularly kind nor bright person, and only later will it be apparent why any words should be spilt over her. For now, however, she was a female host, women who carry out tasks of death and errands of regret, of Rita Kuznetsovs and other such weatherers of life.
But none of the above was at the tip of the mind of Mia Schultz at the beginning of August 2018. She was a 6'0" tall young white woman with mid-length white hair, who typically dressed androgynously in a button-down shirt tucked into her pants.
Tact had never been one of Mia's better traits, and she had nurtured an anger, generally, to things in life that bothered her. In those swells of emotion she could feel something deeply, for otherwise her life was comprised of many things that elicited little response. She was a loner and did not speak much to others in real life, although she argued much on the internet. The internet had become her own focused slit of perception through which she had retreated herself, as many others have since the emergence of Revenants. Although the internet is not reality, it was one to Mia.
She had not socialized with many others her age but Urasaria students, a few of whom used to flirt with her until she let them know she was underage (although she occasionally declined to mention it). She identified herself with Urasaria students, although to what extent this identification was due to her own genetic inability to become a host is for others to deem, for since the time she was a teenager she had been aware of a substrata of life she would be permanently disbarred from accessing.
She had become an observer of others, whether as a young girl at others' birthdays, usually sitting alone, a shy girl observing, storing things inside herself that she might later communicate to someone older. This erudition and introspection had continued to swirl her to the edges of others, the deepening of herself into as an odd an interest as Urasaria Academy students; the development of herself had followed the development of her circumstances as well.
Today she was visiting a building whose purpose had become nearly superfluous in recent years: a prison for former hosts. There was a man whose name she knew as Rodale at the front desk, along with his supervisor.
"Afternoon, Mia." said Rodale. "Here to visit your father?"
"Yes."
He started typing. "I'll have them bring him out soon, then. Any particular reason you were so late today?"
"Revenant."
She turned away, and heard the supervisor titter with some comment to Rodale before she sat down and took out her phone. She then continued to engage in one of those endless internet arguments she constantly placed herself in; she had increasingly begun to use the internet as a punching bag. To her mind, her years as a latchkey child walking home with Urasaria students had grounded an obligation to defend them, acidic as she was.
*Go ask a radiation victim in California if students are too violent.*
*I would rather have a lesbian student my age helping me instead of a dumb fascist cop, but I've actually dealt with both of them, unlike you.*
*Cops abuse their de-facto legal immunity for decades and no one cares, but a student shoplifts and this is what you sanctimonious dipshits care about?*
She had seen enough violent hosts with Revenants to feel no sympathy over their deaths. She had seen her first corpse when she was nine years old, though felt nothing for it, even after the realization of what it had been struck her weeks later. The residential areas around Urasaria Academy are paradoxically safe yet considered dangerous; students are able to respond quickly to all rogue hosts, though the frequency of such attacks is high. Similarly paradoxical is the disconnect between social politics and criminological stances in the surrounding counties, which is best summed as the median voter believing lesbianism should be applauded and criminality executed.
Mia was able to step outside of her own geographical region, somewhat, yet still had been seeped into by some of these stances. But, rent had been cheap around Urasaria Academy, and she came from parents who never had much money until her father's arrest.
She heard the front doors open and a Urasaria student stepped inside. She was a young redhead whose movements were akin to that of a millipede, and as Mia would confess, she was not a particularly normal woman. They had spoken a few times before, yet Mia found that she spoke as awkwardly as herself, with even more esoteric interests. But Mia supposed that hosthood, as with all other forms of freedom, acted as amplifiers for all that existed within a person; the violent grew more violent, the odd odder, and the sullen would retreat into their eyes alone as bearers to their existence.
The redhead pulled out a cigarette. One of Manufacture's metal rods formed in her other hand, and an electrical spark from it lit her cigarette as another arc pulled the smoke away.
Rodale spoke up. "This isn't a smoking prison, miss Star Thrower."
"I have to smoke to power my Revenant."
"Never heard of one like that."
"Then you -- you should be grateful I-I informed you. You know, i-it purifies the chemicals out so I can spew it at enemy ho-hosts. It's environmentalist."
Rodale sighed and a guard called out to Mia. She stood up and was about to be escorted, then said to Rodale: "I'm glad she could clear that up for you." She was escorted to the telephone visitation hall, then sat across from her father Stefan.
She put the phone to her ear. "There was a Revenant, I'm sorry I'm so late."
"That's alright, I'll just have to speak quicker." He laughed. "So, first off, let me know - who's on guard today?"
"It's Julia Bates. Star Thrower. The redhead. She's a second-year, her Revenant is Manufacture, and her name comes from a Loren Eiseley story about throwing starfishes-"
"Alright, you don't have to give me the fansite version."
"Julia doesn't have fans. She constantly offers that up herself. Perhaps she craves praise while doing the oppose of everything that would garner it. I don't know."
"Well, hopefully they'll have a real celebrity tomorrow. What about… college admissions are soon, right? Those going well?"
"They did. I already told you I was accepted, didn't I?"
"Good, good. And your major? Is it still going to be Psychology?"
"That or Criminology, yes. I would need to be in school for longer with a Psychology degree, but Criminology, there's plenty of careers that would open up with that. Some of them with alphabet agencies, some with police, which I don't love, but…" She sighed. "I hadn't expected to talk about this when I came here, but I've done my research when it comes to that. I know I'll need to support her when her hands do finally give out, but how much financial support does she actually need from me?"
"Age introduces a lot of unforeseen costs, Mia. You know that a Psychology degree is affordable for us. Any degree is. But I would prefer you go with something a bit more direct in terms of a path to a career."
"Why are my interests always being put on hold? I could support her fine with either of those degrees, and it isn't as if I'll be single my entire life, either. A college education is valuable regardless of the field - it's a ward against poverty."
"Well, I suppose we'll have to discuss that as we get closer. But there's no guarantee that what Alina has isn't genetic, and I would hate for you to get trapped in that terrible situation just like her and I were."
"I understand that, but... I feel like your desire to force me not to experience poverty again is almost as stressful as the memory of it itself."
"Fine. Then I'll let you go home with it. What about your dating life? Anyone new in that?"
"Never mind, we can go back to the poverty." muttered Mia. "I… well. Maybe that'll improve at college, as well."
"I'm sure you'll do well. You know your mother says you have the height of a model."
"I know I'm not exactly in short demand with women. I just haven't felt the impulse yet to seriously date, and it isn't for lack of wanting some attachment, but… I don't know."
Stefan grinned. "And is Julia single?"
"Oh God, no." Mia's face scrunched. "Please. A-and even if I were into her, students don't date civilians, regardless. Not to any serious extent. It's just inherently depressing. We die. They don't. Not naturally, at least."
They continued to talk, yet still Mia felt her life was being gripped by her parents again; she felt these interrogations were slights against her, intentional or not. She had difficulty letting such things go, and held almost all of them in her skull akin to the hooks of Velcro, a score kept track of in only her singular mind.
She still loved her father, perhaps moreso than she did her mother, though not to any sense of identifying more heavily with one or the other. It was merely that her father had sacrificed himself for their family, and thus any resentment she could hold towards his absence seemed ungrateful. Since Mia was a child, her mother Alina had been unable to work long hours due to a persistent issue in her hands, one of those primarily female illnesses with no known cause and that most doctors disbelieved: partially why Stefan had always been bullish on Mia's education.
Having grown up in poverty, hearing this dictum and others, she had felt an accretion of adult stressors upon herself far earlier than usually appropriate. Even as an 18-year-old woman now, she felt still this wall of fear that even her happier expressions could barely rise over; she was not depressed, but rather ruminated and had been forced to ruminate more than was entirely healthy. And though she hated her father's imprisonment, a part of her was grateful that his arrest and the money he had stolen, still obtainable by the family, had alleviated somewhat her stressors, to where recently she had felt a gradual sinking back into her own age.
After a guard escorted Mia back to the waiting room, she noticed the Urasaria student Julia was still smoking. The cancer risk was no obstacle to Julia; Mia had seen students survive amputation before, for the bacterial colony on their hearts gave them intense durability. As she walked past, Julia pulled the smoke away from her eyes.
On the way home, she decided to walk closer by Urasaria Academy's street, though she always could imagine it deeply in her head. Businesses and places of residence gradually thin until there is a long unpaved road with no speed limit sign posted; not that students would have understood the concept of one; and the tall walls covered in fireflies, along with the rural country almost intentionally barren with aged weeds, as if meant to project an austerity that did not match most students she knew and liked. There are their various courts for host versions of sports and other hobbies that would kill a civilian to even attempt, and other amenities students have constructed themselves.
Students are kept almost unnaturally separate from the civilian population, which along with the natural segregation of the immortal and mortal, means that most interactions students have with civilians are in hostile or investigative contexts. Yet it was occasionally this tendency that Mia had been able to exploit, for a show of admiration or respect was enough to melt the corners of most's mouths into a smile.
As she made her way over, she texted her mother, then heard a voice murmur "FTL." behind her as four arms gripped her from behind and she fell unconscious.