Project: Gamer Ver. Error, File Not Found
Anime Adjacent Entry: 001
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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I don't think I've ever written a journal before. Or diary. Log?
I guess it doesn't matter what it should be called.
Oh, uh, right. Dates. It's harder to keep track of things if I don't put down dates. Sorry. This is- I'm just writing as I think. No proofreader.
It's the fifteenth of October, nineteen ninety-two. My name, this time, is Ginji Areru and I'm fifteen.
I wasn't always Areru, though. And I... know I used to be older.
I just don't know how much older.
The last thing I remember? Before I was reborn? There's this space, between realities. I was traveling through it. I'd finally found a path back home.
And I was stopped. It's hard to describe what that place is like and it's even harder to describe the things that inhabit that space. The realm between realms, the gap between not worlds but entire realities is... infinite and vast. Filled with entities that are more concept than flesh or blood.
One such entity, great and powerful enough to hold entire realities in it- her?- hands wanted something from me.
I knew its name, then. It spoke, though the words feel like cotton rubbing against my brain now. It wanted something from me. Something that I knew? I offered it freely, then, with the only stipulation being that she let me leave, finally, and go home.
They refused my demands. They told me that if I wouldn't just give them what they wanted, they could take it. Rip it from my mind and then use me as a tool, as a pawn to set the board and create the... thing? Create whatever it was that she wanted.
There's so much context that's just missing, now.
It waited, this creature of chaos. Its violet eyes stared at me, boring into my exposed soul. It knew, or at least it thought, that I couldn't fight it.
And it was right. I knew that it was right. I couldn't hope to fight something like that. I'm strong, sure, but their metaphysical weight was like comparing myself as a plankton against something the size and intensity of the sun itself.
I could try and fight. I could be a virulent agent, trying to weaken them from within if I could somehow break through entire realities worth of defenses.
But I would need to do everything right and they would need to do everything wrong. Maybe, if I'd known about them in advance and had access to the former source of my power? Well. I don't think it would have shifted things in my favor all that much.
But I am a petty bastard.
"I Wish that what you wanted was lost! Shattered, destroyed, broken and irreparable!"
Whatever the Chaos had wanted from me, it was in my past. In my memories. My first life.
I still remember my second life. The struggles and tribulations and the laughter and love that I'd found. I didn't remember them all at once. But there are... memories of memories, hidden within. I remember remembering things from my first life. I remember talking about it.
But I can't actually remember that life at all.
So, in that context, I have to assume that the Wish I'd called into being, that what the violet-eyed Chaos wanted, was somewhere in that life.
I lost something- No, I destroyed something- and I don't even remember what it is.
The Chaos roiled. I could feel the rage, the fury and the screaming. But, when the Chaos spoke?
"Unfortunate. Your foolishness will not go unpunished."
The words were absolutely calm. As though the storm in the void wasn't furious, as though my actions were utterly banal, utterly expected.
With a bare twitch of the entity's will, bars closed in on me. Immaterial and all the more solid, made of its will.
I tried to escape. I called on every spell, tried hiding within realities on the fringe of the multiverse, ran...
It didn't matter. At all.
I thought I was on the edge of the territory that the entity claimed. I thought I was close to freedom. I tried ripping through a multiversal wall, out towards the unclaimed wilds where imagination had never been limited by concepts and found myself trapped instead.
The living Chaos found my efforts amusing, at least so it seemed. I was almost free. One more beat of my wings, a bare grasping of my claws and I would have escaped.
Except escape was never possible.
The Chaos was everywhere. Omniversal. Every step I'd made, every mistake or success along my path... The Chaos had known. Its hand closed on me, held me back. Held me down.
The last memory before my current life started was a pair of dark eyes, glimmering with amusement as darkness filled my vision and silence deafened my ears.
As for my current life?
I was born to Ginji Emily, a woman from the United States that my father had met and drunkenly impregnated during a business trip. My father, Ginji Daisuke, is an engineer that works with a metallurgy firm. Apparently, he'd had a successful meeting with some aeronautics firm and had gone out to drink and celebrate, which is when the two met.
Mind, a night of drunken passion does not a marriage make. According to my father, after he'd come home, he hadn't heard about her or thought of my mother at all until she turned up at his front door, visibly pregnant, six months later.
I don't know how she found him. He's never told me the story. And, considering they divorced when I was five, I don't think I'll ever know.
She went back to the States and I was left with Daisuke. I have a few memories of her, not many though. I don't have any miraculous recollection of events that happened before I was three or four. And the events of my second life didn't start coming back until I was eight or so.
I do recall that she seemed... sad. Sad and lonely. I don't think she had any friends.
Well, we don't live in Tokyo. Or any of the other cities in Japan. The ancestral Ginji home is in the mountains of the Okayama prefecture, on a little bit of land that we were granted in the past for our service to the local lord as caretakers, though not priests, of a nearby shrine. Technically, we were considered rice farmers who maintained the buildings and lands of the shrine in our spare time.
This is a joke. For whatever reason, anyone that wasn't a noble back when we were gifted our land was considered a rice farmer who did their actual dayjob on the side.
So, with that in mind? We were pretty isolated. And I was a difficult kid. My father was only home two or three nights a week, which made things worse. His job is in Tokyo so he keeps an apartment there.
Kept an apartment there.
He's got another house, these days.
I'll... get into that later.
Much later.
Regardless. Parents got divorced when I was five and mom went back to the States. I still get a letter from her from time to time.
She's doing well.
It relieved a lot of pressure on Daisuke, too. My paternal grandfather, Ginji Shinji, did not approve of my mom. Might've had something to do with him being a World War Two veteran. He'd been in Okinawa. I can't find too much information here on the subject but I've got an impression, I think it's an echo from my first life, and it's telling me that his posting isn't the honor that he claims it is.
He doesn't approve of me, either.
That used to hurt, honestly. Still does, really, but I've gotten some perspective over the last seven years.
Back after mom left? Daisuke tried to be a father. He was home more often. We shared some interests. Despite everything else that's happened, I still remember sitting and watching Robotech and Gundam with him as some of my happiest childhood memories. The two of us sitting at the table and putting together a model robot on my ninth birthday...
Well. That doesn't happen anymore.
Eight years old? Nineteen Eighty-Five? That was an important year for me. That was when I started to remember my last life. It came in fits and starts. Dreams, mostly. I could remember things in my sleep. I could remember how to do things in my sleep.
Spells and strange abilities that both were and weren't magic all at once. I would wake up with my fingertips tingling, my head pounding and my eyes itching.
The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with me when I finally brought it up. Probably later than I should have but Daisuke had been coming home later and later. Sometimes he wouldn't come home at all and he'd just leave a message on the answering machine.
When I started seeing things? Especially in the forests around our home?
The doctors still couldn't find anything but I remember them talking to Daisuke in hushed whispers. Asking if there had been anything wrong with my foreign mother. If there had been anything wrong with her mind.
Daisuke didn't come home for three straight days after that. I'm glad self-sufficiency is actually a big thing in Japanese culture. I'd already been taught how to make basic meals. And there were impressions from another life, my second life, that filtered through and filled in the gaps.
And I spent a lot of that time watching the woods, listening to the birds and insects that lived nearby.
Watching the strange, new things that I could see.
Mostly, I encountered little men made out of clay. They were strange little things, with misshapen, lumpy bodies and heads that always had a trio of holes in them rather than actual faces. None of them traveled very far. I never saw any of them eat anything.
They seemed to like rocks, though.
A few times I'd catch a glimpse of little men wearing robes darting through the undergrowth. They had small, beady eyes and thick, heavy beards that often went all the way down to their waists.
One of the strangest creatures I'd discovered was a deer. It had a hundred prongs on its antlers, easily, but the most striking thing had been its face. It had the face of an old man with a wry, amused grin and only a few rotten teeth left in its mouth.
The thing caught me staring, once. I'd expected it to talk, to say something, but it just laughed, winked at me and leapt off, disappearing into the woods.
None of them ever came looking for me. Most of them would run if they did see me, or if I made too much noise.
The one exception was the mountain ghost.
I don't know who she'd been in life but the other spirits seemed to ignore her, and her them. She had amber eyes and a great mane of white hair, a sign of age that wasn't reflected on her face. Her dress was strange, too. More modern than the robes or tunics some of the other spirits wore.
And, unlike them, she was silent. The various forest spirits would chitter and chatter at each other, make clicking or clacking sounds in some kind of language I can't understand.
But none of them tried to communicate with her. And she acted as though she couldn't see them.
The first few times I saw her, though? She was always floating through the air. I once noticed her, on a night that had gotten too dark before I'd realized the time, hovering high in the sky and watching the moon.
Maybe it was a mistake. It probably was a mistake, actually. Most spirits just want to be left alone, free to be a part of nature.
But Daisuke was staying away for longer and longer with every passing month and the kids at school didn't want to be friends with the half-gaijin.
So, one day? I waved at her.
The confusion on her face is something that I've burned into my memory. It wasn't funny, not at all. But the idea that someone could feel hopeful because of me wasn't something I was used to.
She'd looked around, as though there would by anyone other than some of the three-legged crows in the sky, before looking back down at me and pointing to herself in confusion.
I nodded to her and waved again.
She rocketed down to me, faster than anything I'd ever seen, her mouth moving silently as she reached out to me.
I couldn't hear what she was trying to say, though. And her hands just passed through me when she tried to put them on my shoulders. The heartbreak on her face when she realized that she couldn't touch me, that I couldn't hear her...
I won't make up any excuses. It felt like there was a hole in my chest and the look on her face mirrored it. Perfectly. I hadn't seen Daisuke in a week, I'm an outcast at school for being born in the wrong womb. I was just as alone as she was.
"Can you hear me?" I remember asking her.
She nodded, her mane of wild hair bouncing up and down as her lips moved silently.
"My name is Areru," I told her. No family name. Certainly not my true name, not that I could recall it back then. "What's yours?"
It took a few tries, I had to watch her mouth closely as she tried to slow down and enunciate. After a few tries, though, I grinned and nodded.
"Well," I told her. "I'm happy to meet you, Ry-o-ko."
The tears that fell down her face disappeared before they could reach the ground and she tried to wrap her arms around me. Maybe it was just in my head but I could swear I felt something for a moment, a ghost of a touch.
My own eyes burned, I remember that.
Even if it was from a ghost? That was the first hug I'd gotten in years.
