Displacement
1: You meet a girl
Your strength as a human decreased today. It seems that you accidentally made a friend. Now, for many people this isn't unusual, they run into each other, find something in common, and become friends. It happens everyday to millions of people. It's even more common when it's a high school classmate.
It's not usual for you.
You're the type of person who, in their second year of high school, still hadn't made a single friend.
The type of person who says things like "If you make friends, your strength as a human will decrease."
Yet you had made a friend today.
You had made a friend, even though you had little in common. She was smart, respectable, everything you weren't. There was no reason for you to have become friends. You hadn't run into each other in a normal way, either. It was even the kind of situation you wouldn't tell people about. The kind of situation where people would ask how you met and you would have to answer with nervous laughter and vague generalizations. The kind of situation where you felt you should have been slapped at some point, but she instead she gave you her phone information. Against your will.
She was a very kind person, your new friend.
It was for her sake you were out this late at night. You had snuck out of the house and went to the bookstore, though you didn't want to say how this was for her sake, it didn't change the fact that it was for her sake. She hadn't asked you to, and it would be terrible if she knew, but let's just accept that you went for her sake, and that you're now heading back home, having spent the very last bit of money to your name.
This is what you meant by losing your strength as a human. It wasn't about the money. When you were alone you only had to worry about your own concerns and problems. If you had friends, then when your friends were troubled you too were troubled. When your friends were sad, you too were sad. And the more friends you had, the more their troubles and sadness weighed you down, dividing your strength between them.
Normally you would never be out this late, but it was so that you wouldn't bring trouble to your friend that you had gone to the bookstore. You hated to go out at night. No, that wasn't right, it wasn't the night you hated.
It was the sky.
The fake sky that appeared three years ago, replacing the normal constellations of stars with new ones. When the false heavens had first appeared, they had been empty, and had created a world wide panic. Scientists had lost contact with anything beyond the moon, and according to every test the universe now began and ended just beyond the moon's orbit. It was like the rest of the universe had gotten sick of us and thrown us out.
You felt evicted.
The night sky, empty at first, had slowly broken out in a rash of lights, though where these lights came from, no one knew. The sun continued to shine during the day, despite not existing according to every test humans could try, and the stars had returned, even though they weren't the same stars. So, in the end, most people had settled down and accepted this shrunken universe. Things had gone on as before, people worked, married, and even celebrated Tanabata despite Orihime and Hikoboshi having vanished with the rest of the real heavens.
It still bothered you though.
Perhaps that was because you had so few things that you could call skills? After you had managed to enter a prestigious private high school, you had become a dunce. It just seems that you couldn't catch up. Or should it be that you had fallen behind? Regardless, Astronomy had been one of the few things you had been good at. At the time, when the night sky first vanished, you were still in middle school and not yet a dunce. So you didn't really feel the loss, but now it bothered you. Why did the universe leave, taking away one of the few things you had been skilled at. Now your only saving grace was math. Fortunately being good at math covered a lot of sins. After all, most people think someone who is good at math must be a smart person. It helped hide that you were a dunce, a failure, and had people make excuses for you for the sake of their own preconceptions. Not that you were complaining, because otherwise you might be in danger of flunking out.
You still hated this unfamiliar sky.
It's actually surprising that you can see the stars, now that you think about it. You are walking home in a city, after all. Looking around, you notice that all the lights along the street are out. No, that's not completely right. A single streetlight remains, casting its light on the blonde woman slumped beneath it.
"Save me" you can just make out her words, and hearing them, you now inevitably are forced to walk closer. What sort of person would walk away in this situation?
"You. Boy. I will permit you to save me." Her voice is weak, but that isn't really a surprise. After all, she has no limbs. No, that's wrong, that implies she never had them to begin with. She had lost her limbs. No, that makes it out like she simply forgot them at home! Someone had taken her limbs, leaving her cruelly on the street to bleed out.
What were you supposed to do? How were you going to save her? It's impossible, clearly impossible! She'd bleed out long before an ambulance got here.
A vague, detached part of you realizes that you're panicking, but that doesn't change the fact that you don't know what you're supposed to do.
She turns her head, revealing what must be a beautiful face underneath all that blood, and stares into your eyes.
"Save me!" she demands, clearly knowing that she's shortly going to die.
"I-I can't! It's impossible!" you force out.
She becomes more frantic at that, struggling, for what purpose you couldn't guess. "Please, I don't want to die! Save me!" her voice breaking as she pleads to be saved.
You want to save her. Who wouldn't want to save someone? If there was a way for you to save her, you'd take do in a heart beat. You knew that you were a dunce, and even if you were a genius and somehow had all the skills of Hazama Kuroo you would still be powerless to save her.
You still wanted to save her. You wished there was some way to help her, some way to bargain with the universe. You had never felt this strongly before, but you'd happily give your right arm to be able to do something. Even if you had to die, you still wanted to save her.
It was at this point you felt a foreign presence in your brain. Well, it wasn't so much feel, as you heard words but knew that your ears never felt them. You will always remember the seven little words that changed your life.
"Do you want to make a contract?"
And that was how you saved a woman, in exchange for your very life.
[] What was your wish? (Needs to save the woman).
