Tainted Sky; Rei’s Playlist - Edited Version Preview

[Author's note: Due to the nature of this story, there are many instances of stylized font types, SFX, special symbols, formats, speech bubbles, and images that appear all throughout the novel so I included some examples of what they might look like as footnotes that can be referred to at the bottom of the page. Hope you enjoy >:D]

Track 01

I stood still and watched the movie play out. There was no sound but I heard it, no colours but my mind painted them—between the lines, like a colour-by-number film, except the frameworks were built off imagination and the numbers were composed by distraction.

The theatre had no seats, or popcorn, or friends to laugh with, but it was there, and I was a participant, snared to the spot with awe on my face, blind to the shadows that surrounded the screen.

The movie took place in a city, kinda like Ezveria—my city—except cooler, less real and less mean, with better graphics and kinder actors. Their script was made up of an algorithm of movie-memories jig-sawed together in one awesome concoction. The genre: a kickass, action-packed, flying-car adventure, with robots and superheroes and epic fight scenes in the sky.

To a killer soundtrack, and a killer shot worthy of a best picture award, the main hero makes their entrance, skidding their car vertically along the side of a skyscraper. The camera captures an exhilarating angle of the actor’s boot—only the boot—as they step out of the vehicle and stand sideways against gravity upon the building’s glassy face. The shot crawls slowly upwards, rotating around the girl wearing the space-goddess equivalent of a leather jacket. She poses for a moment and then rips off her sunglasses to reveal:

Zetta; Defender of the Cosmos

The words appear in bold comic book font beside her. The kind of typestyle that can only be read by one of those narrator voices made for movie trailers.

In a world—yeah, like that—of slayers and sonatas, one lone warrior embarks on yet another quest to conquer the omniverse. Zetta the indomitable and her gravity-defying Corvetta take the stage.

She flips her scarlet scarf over her galactic-armored shoulders and it whips in the wind with her equally long brown hair.

-Swip- [*1]

She closes her car door as gracefully as closing a book, then stares the city down. The spirits of her enemies rise and collect into a wonky cloud of purple smog with a diabolical face fit for a ghost-type Bokémon. She locks eyes with the creature and, in the quiet of the elevated air, like the moment of tranquility before a showdown between outlaws, she gathers her power and utters her best one-liner:

“Ack! Sorry!” I’d accidentally bumped into some guy who looked like he really could’ve been an outlaw. His persona reeked of intimidation. I thought I’d been standing still but it turned out I’d been walking, probably to avoid the service counter, my head hundreds of stories in the clouds.

[Enter here the SFX for embarrassment]

I dodged eye-contact as I passed him, but felt the man’s glare anyway. There were too many people here, too many things to look at and listen to… like this nice vinyl flooring for example. I kicked at it, as if I were kicking a pebble.

Pretty sure I was the pebble in this picture.

I pinched the Rezu-chip in my hoodie pocket and bit the inside of my lip, watching everyone’s footsteps rain by.

I approached stairs I hadn’t seen until they reached my feet and took them down, its steps were shallow and wide enough to pass as a ramp and its surface had the colourfully reflective gleam of a bubble. There were too many colours, too many swirls of silhouettes and wonky motions, and my head spun with them as my feet led me to the main foyer; a huge circular space with many foyer-like things I couldn’t look at for long. Stuff like holo signs and modern art displays, and people. Courage slowly drained from my shoulders as if each shoe that passed were stepping over me.

A moment of respite appeared in the form of an empty chair facing a window.

I slumped into it. Took some breaths. Calmed some downs. Crowd sounds rose behind, but I pinned my attention to the window in front, which looked out on a cute, humanless, indoor-outdoor courtyard. A pretend path led to a circle of rocks, but there was no door to get in—or out?—there. Sprouting from the rocks was the giant four-leaf clover that umbrellaed over the entire community centre. Klover Community Centre, to name names. The clover looked like it was made out of the stuff used by 3D-printers, and I think it lit up at night too.

A message blocked my view of the clover for a moment. I frowned. Of course its ad-glass, of course. I stretched out my legs, reaching out to the two-story tall glass wall that angled back a third story, and swiped my sneaker across the headline about yesterday’s blackout. Once: and the news display slid to propaganda from the chief of police, and twice: into oblivion, leaving me to judge my reflection.

Not much of a Zetta, am I?My hair was waaay shorter than hers, kinking out at my jawline. I wasn’t as tall or stylish, and I could barely ever make eye contact with anyone, much less my enemies. I didn’t even have a license.

The only similarity was our scarves. Both red, both long. One fluttered in the wind; the other flopped over my lap whenever I threw it upwards.

The scarf slumped to my lap for a third time before I slapped my cheeks.

“Get it together, Rei. You’re strong. You’re strong.” I held the little black square labeled ‘Reizetta Zykophona’s Rezu #2’ in front of my nose with both hands. The ‘2’ represented my second chance at nailing a job. Even though, technically, this was my 6th Rezu-chip—I’d lost numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, but then found #2 in my sock drawer last night. And technically, this was more like my umpteenth attempt than my second chance, but, I mean, whatever. Details.

I slipped the chip back into my front pocket and stood up. Here’s how this was gonna go: I was going to hand them my Rezu, they’d scan me into the server, then judge my character, rate me as averagely employable, interview me, I’d answer the questions all professional-like, then obtain the job, and work the job, and live monetarily ever after.

“You got this!” I held my fists by my sides, clenching triumph in each palm before turning around. It was almost a 180 turn, until it was a 360.

Okay, maybe if I closed my eyes for that first step, I could trick my brain into thinking I was somewhere else and it wouldn’t seem so scary.

Boof [*2]

“Ack, sorry!” My shut-eye tactic hadn’t gotten me very far. I bumped into some other guy wearing the exact same black shirt the first man had been wearing. I held my nose and squinted, and my gaze fell to the object on the stranger’s waist. Confusion struck me as I peeked up at his face. He had blond-brown hair braided back into a dual-coloured ponytail, and—even though he didn’t look like a police officer—there was a sword strapped to his hip.

He retracted his hand from a Silvertooth earpiece and stared down at me.

~ ~ ~ [*3]

So, uh… remember when I was going about my day with a Rezu-chip in hand, and hopes and dreams and all that fun stuff?

Well, yeah, that wasn’t the case anymore.

The man with the different shades of braids now stood with a drawn sword and a snarl over the many frightened civilians of Klover Community Centre. His bluish-grey blade weaved threateningly beside his march, like the serpentine hand of a nurse before an injection. Beyond him, a ring of lackeys stood two metres apart in matching black shirts and fancy utility belts, trapping us in a tight huddle with our backs to Klover’s encased clover. They wore blank expressions behind bandana masks, and had steel bows planked across their thighs.

Radicals.

I knelt smack-dab in the front row, forced into submission by the shouts of fellow marks and swordsmen before I knew what was going on. Sprawled out behind were the other helpless individuals who’d been going about their morning.

Job hunting. Yep, that’s how I’d started this day. I must have been the only person in all of Ezveria who could screw up the task bad enough to become the hunted.

Whimpers and muffled sobs harmonized from behind. I’d ignored their sounds before but not anymore. Their fear was infectious. Whether or not that fear had seeped into my gaze, I didn’t know. The only sure feeling I felt was a blaze of hatred bubbling inside me, directed at the man who’d coordinated the attack. The man who was pacing in a U-shaped path that passed my place in the huddle more than any other.

Each clacking step left me simmering. A few more seconds or a few more paces might have made me commit to an idea stupid enough to threaten the life of every hostage in this room. But sitting here, doing nothing? I couldn’t handle that. My timidness came with the kind of flaw that would get you fired umpteen-too-many times: provoke me, and I’d forget who I was.

The ringleader clicked a button on his belt and spoke into his earpiece in a hard, cold voice. “Is this some kind of joke? What have I asked of you, officers? The release of my comrades, right? And I told you I’d know if you were screwing me over, right?”

Garbage. This man is a waste of a human being.

His chuckle lasted a beat. “That’s not what my associate said. From what I heard, only a few holo projections of our troops were set free. Were you trying to dupe us, officer? Hmm? Because, if you didn’t care so much about the differences between a real person and a figmentation, then I could start sending out a few ghosts of our own.”

Someone screamed. I flinched. The ringleader made a hand gesture and an arrow zipped over our heads. A wave of cries followed it. I remained in place, silent, stunned maybe, or mentally gone.

“Quiet!” he shouted.

I couldn’t turn around. My body refused to find out where the arrow had lodged.

His tone changed when he spoke back into his earpiece. It was darker, more sinister. Those with better seating wouldn’t have heard it: “If you want even one of these hostages to survive, you’ll do as I say. I’ve done crueler things for your government than cause 50 casualties, give or take.”

He clicked his belt again and swung his blade up to rest on his shoulder.

“Listen up, dimwits. Your corrupted cops don’t seem to care about you enough to follow simple instructions, so some of you might have to start dying in a few minutes. Take your picks.”

My hand coiled around my scarf, but I remained otherwise motionless. These scum didn’t deserve my tears, or the sight of my fear. Monsters like these didn’t need any more feelings of triumph.

There wasn’t a single hero from a single film who would have allowed this kind of injustice, and (as a fan) I didn’t want to either.

“You have a fierce look in your eye there, little lady.”

If it were Zetta here, instead of me, she would have saved everyone by now. She would’ve whipped out her compact mirror, chucked it in the air like a ninja star, had it shapeshifted into its vehicular state and run over all her foes using her telekinetic power. All her enemies would’ve KAPOWed or FWUMPed out of the way and humanity would have been safe once again.

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about doing something heroic?”

But I wasn’t Zetta. I didn’t own a weapon, and this was my first hostage-taking scene ever. Crazy as it was, those weren’t uncommon in Ezverian society. Radical demonstrations of every kind were becoming the norm, these days. Every other month it seemed like a mall or a school or some business company was being attacked or ransacked in the name of justice, or as a call to freedom, or a noisy request for minimum wage.

Kindred Spritz, Poison Donation, Adeptus Thread, Vanditization; there were a number of groups tagged all over the city via graffiti or sticky holo projections or 3D printed sculptures that were taken down within a day, but none, in any given form, were ever this close.

The leader crouched in front of me and pressed one gloved hand against my cheeks. “Listen to people when they talk to you.” I pressed my lips into a tight line, or as tight as they could go with his fingers smushing together the sides. The bluish-silver tint of his blade gleamed in my eye from beside my neck. It pierced my hair to punctuate his threat.

I was frozen.

“Maybe you’d like to be next.” The blade slid through my hair as he considered this.

I’m supposed to be afraid. Some distant area of my brain understood that, but the stillness I was trapped in was not infused with fear. Knowing there was someone behind me who’d been… wounded, at best, because of a flick of this man’s hand, had already driven me to a level of disgust and rage I hadn’t known I possessed.

“If you knew anything at all about the government you enslave yourself to, you wouldn’t look at me like that. None of you would.” His sword swooshed over my head as he stood, an incomprehensible, dark amusement spreading over his face.

If I knew, my butt!I wasn’t even part of the slaving class yet. He’d ruined my chances of that by causing this mess. If anyone needed educating, it was him.

A scene played out; another movie in my head: I yank his weapon from his arms and twirl the blade around with the finesse of a DJ, leveling the tip to its true target. Swip. Just like that, a simple, elegant cadence with blood oozing out of his chest and a finale to my fury. Cue level-up music. The credits roll.

. . . And then the arrows from his minions would probably skewer me.

I twitched.

The smile left his face. Whatever expression my imagination had led me to make didn’t sit well with him. He angled the tip of his blade down towards my chest. The end met my scarf. My eyes widened.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. [*4]

“Dex.”

I was close enough to hear the voice inside his headset.

‘Dex’ stopped taunting me and peered over his shoulder mere seconds before the end of my life. I followed his gaze.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

A boy strolled out of a hallway and into the ring of archers, his eyes locked on the phone in his palm. He wore a short-sleeved black jacket with wrist-warmers on both wrists, one longer than the other. His hair was a messy clump of black tufts held down by a pair of vibrantly coloured headphones—which were clearly deafening him to the presence of danger.

What kind of music could distract a person so thoroughly? His eyes weren’t even closed like mine had been.

“Hey!” shouted Dex.

Thumb scrolling, expression oblivious, the boy continued his blind march towards the huddle of hostages.

I flicked my eyes between him and our designated villain and briefly wondered which of them was the bigger stupidface.

“Hey!” Dex yelled again. He swung his blade back to his shoulder and strode towards the boy.

Using the sixth sense headphone wearers always seemed to have, the boy started making a detour around him without so much as a glance up. Dex’s blade swooped down and brushed the red cord to the boy’s headphones with cutthroat precision. He finally looked up—lazily. Carelessly.

“Today ain’t your lucky day, kid,” said Dex, devilish grin returning. “You shoulda stayed in the washroom to piss your pants where it was socially acceptable.”

It didn’t seem like Dex fully understood how headphones worked. The boy tilted his head in confusion. He must not have heard a single word.

Dex cocked his head to the ceiling and let out a humourless puff of laughter.

The boy pushed one earmuff off his ear, unaffected by the glistening death-threat pointed his way, then waited for who knows what.

Dex’s smile remained, but only while his sword flew up. When it went down, his expression transitioned to a killer’s scowl. The boy backed away, but was too late. The sword ripped clothes, skin, and blood from his chest. The impact pushed him backward. He tilted on his heels, and his body went down,

down,

down,

then thud. [*5]

Five seconds. Then time streamed on like normal, ignoring the fact that a life had been lost.

Screams rang through my eardrums, not nearly as deafening as his body hitting the floor, the thump of my heart against my chest, or the vibrations of the two. If I thought the mob had been hysterical before, they were crazed now.

I stood up with the grace of a zombie. My vision was jittering, as if trying to focus on something that wasn’t there. Red lasers dotted my arms and upper body.

“This / This / This is just / just a pre— / pre— / preview of what hap— / happens when people / when people upse— / upset / upset me / me / me.” [*6]

The murderer’s voice sounded like a broken recording of a faraway echo, as if the needle of a record player could find only shards of his voice. This was now also the condition of my better judgement. Broken and far away.

“Your / Your / Your distress / stress / stress / is only a frag— / frag— / fragment / —ment / —ment / of what we / we / felt / felt / felt for our frien— / friends / false / false / false / convictions / —tions”

What did that boy have to do with any of that? Why did he have to die for their dumb cause?

Still infatuated by his own speech, the terrorist was approaching me again. No, wait, I think… I think I was the one approaching him this time.

“Your / Your gov— / government / —ment / is messed up / up / up / No / No / your society—”

Our society doesn’t need the likes of you. A warning arrow shot past my eyes. Dex glanced in my direction, smirking, still speechifying. I continued towards him. Another arrow zoomed by, this time ripping through my hoodie’s sleeve and grazing my arm. I froze. Fear tickled my numb limbs.

He chuckled. “You’ll face death but you’re afraid of a little pain?”

It wasn’t the pain. Not this time.

His chuckle morphed into a bloodcurdling cry as a scarlet sword pierced through his armored side. The air around the sword shuddered as if shaken by an invisible force. Dex the murderer stumbled away—though perhaps he couldn’t be considered a murderer anymore. The boy he’d killed had just slashed him through the waist.

I’d watched him die and now I was watching him kill.

As Dex stumbled off to the side, I got a clear view of the messy-haired boy with the out-of-nowhere sword in his hand. His disinterested gaze was now filled with determination, irises swirling with reds like the red, purple, and blues were on his headphones. His clothes were ripped diagonally where he’d been cut, but his wound was gone. No scratch nor scar; only a bloodstain by the tear’s edge.

The cellphone he’d held was replaced with the hilt of a long single-edged blade. The weapon itself seemed alive, glowing in time with all the colours on the rims of his headphones. The red cord, once plugged into his phone, was now hanging from the hilt.

I put the pieces together.

He’s a sell-soul?

An internet legend; a conspiracy theorist’s dream come to life, but that’s what he is. That’s what he has to be. I’d only seen a handful of memes about them, maybe one or two BlueTubers talking about the ‘lunatics’ who sold half their souls for inhuman capabilities. I’d written them off as staged publicity stunts, things I wished, but didn’t actually believe were real. Magical things were supposed to stop once they reached the screen. Everything outside of that became the artificial; the holo re-enactment of a fantasy; a lie.

He shouldn’t be possible. Nothing in this world should be able to do what he’d just done. But the blood that spilled was real, and the boy standing woundless above was even more so. How else could I have explained the twisting glow in his eyes, the conversion of his weapon, the full self-revival? Normal people didn’t get up after being slashed across the chest by a sword. Normal people didn’t unblinkingly face a mob of radicals.

I watched the bloody scene in a daze. Unable to retreat back to the crowd, I remained standing. A target.

The boy positioned himself in front of me, shielding me from the man he’d just stabbed. All the marksmen in the room aimed their arrows at him. Now that he was close, I realized that, although I’d called him a kid, he was my height. Maybe seventeen. He stood in a lowered stance. His sword ready. Seventeen and ready for the world.

I’d seen him come back to life once already, but I didn’t want to see him die again.

“You’ll pay for that, boy.” The man’s voice was strained by his own pain and weighted by his rage. The sword he’d been using like a toy looked far more frightening being dragged against the floor, with blood from his own wound streaking down its length. He signalled to his fellow goons. I flinched, expecting arrows to pierce our bodies, but his signal must have told them not to interfere. The red laser dots drifted away.

Even hunched over in pain, Dex was larger than the sell-soul who stood unwavering as my shield. Dex lunged towards us for a slash. The boy easily redirected it.

He took a deeper stance and yanked his blade back, causing the red cord to ripple. I could have touched it if I’d wanted to. I watched his thumb swipe upwards along the fabric of the hilt. Beneath its surface, the faint glow of a screen lit up and a triangular bar rose from green to yellow to orange. An instant later, his weapon drove horizontally across Dex’s chest, then swooped upwards at a diagonal. Twice more at different angles, carving an asterisk out of his armor through half-blocked attacks. He toppled back.[TS11]

The crowd screamed louder. Red lasers dotted us from every direction as Dex hit the floor. The boy shot his gaze at me with a speed deadlier than the lasers and next thing I knew, he’d tripped me. As I, too, fell, he tossed the blade with his right hand, caught the cord in his left, and gripped one of the huge earmuffs on the side of his head. Wielding the sword like a long mace, he let out a yell.

My head hit the floor and I shut my eyes against the stars, hugging my headache and curling up in a ball. I heard the clang of metal on floor and the rumbling of many feet.

Despite my splitting head, I fought to open my eyes.

I wished I hadn’t.

At first, I saw only blurry feet tumbling in every direction. They tumbled over benches, knocked down fake plants. Beside me, I noticed a broken arrow, and another, and another, and another. I reached for one to verify if it was real. Someone stepped on my hair. I held that instead, then attempted to sit up so I’d look less like a carpet.

A cough drew my attention. The sell-soul was on all fours nearby. Blood was on the floor in front of him and…and…

“Can you…pull these out for me? …Please?”

My jaw trembled. I gaped at the three arrows sticking out of his back. The animated swirls in his eyes were gone and his irises shook as if they were searching for their former colour. Blood dripped from his mouth to the floor. As I watched, his sword reverted back to a phone.

“I can’t—heal—myself—if they’re still…inside.” His breathing was level, calm, but in a way that was forced. Painful to listen to.

It was common knowledge never to remove an arrowhead from a wound without proper medical treatment, but it would probably go against common sense to question a guy who could come back to life. He’d also saved my life without a second thought mere seconds ago—or minutes perhaps; I wasn’t too sure what concussions did to your sense of time.

I swallowed my fear. Put a supporting hand against his chest and wrapped the other, trembling, around one of the cold, metal arrows.

“I-I’m sorry.” My voice cracked. I looked away and pulled as hard as I could.

He cried out and I felt like crying back. I tossed the arrow away and quickly fumbled for the next one, still refusing to look but feeling the—the wetness, the gooey redness—It’s okay: this is probably like ripping off a band-aid to him; it’s okay: you’re strong, you can do this. The second one came out, and this cry was laced with far more pain than the last. I reached the final one, but had to stop. The censored banner over his back was corroding away.

Blood. So much blood. It was so red. So warm. So, all over my hand, soaking his shirt. So real.

Who am I kidding? He wasn’t a machine. He wasn’t even holding himself up anymore. One of his hands was weakly clinging onto my arm. The slightest squeeze from his fingers felt like a desperate plea for me to stop.

“I—” I can’t do this! Tears smeared across half my vision until a bluish light guided my eyes to the gruesome sight of his back, and I forgot about speaking. A blue, then purple, flower made of light was twirling over the first wound. Glowing. The thinnest of petals shaped like wires were looping in and out of his skin in formation of a carnation. Slowly closing up the gash.

The heck!

A second flower began to bud out of the next wound… It’s fine. Don’t question it. It’s fine. He’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.

The flowers were saving him. In the clamour of chaos, I watched them weave and mend. The flowers are saving him. I breathed. All I needed to do was save the flowers.

“H-hang in there, okay?” I said to myself. To him too, though he didn’t respond, just kept rasping. “I-it’s just one more, alright?”

He nodded. I took a deep breath, and tugged the last arrow free. He yelled until his voice broke.

“You’ll pay for this.”

I looked up, straight into Dex’s face. Blood was draining from the star-shaped wound on his chest and stomach, dripping into the crumblings of his armored clothing. He was struggling to breathe. Sweat dotted his face. He raised his sword slowly above his head, giving us a look people usually reserve for vermin. “You’ll regret interfering.”

The boy in my arms couldn’t fight—that much was clear. The question was, could I?Holding a bloodied arrow and an injured stranger?

I threw the arrow at Dex’s head. It would have grazed his cheek, had he not tilted his head to the right.

From the corner of my eye I saw the headphoned boy reach for his phone. The terrorist smirked.

I blinked.

Before either could swing their weapons, two sharpened steel boomerangs whizzed over my head and criss-crossed in front of the radical. Both boomerangs carried chains that axled through their centres, and a familiar insignia that was too fast to see, but not enough that I couldn’t guess.

The weapons reeled back as if homing in, and the X of chains hit Dex’s chest with a metallic thwack. He gave a gurgling yell of agony. Jagged, bluish-white lines of light flittered around his chest where the chains had bound him.

His body crumpled and was dragged backward. Brutality that would have been covered by mosaics if caught on the news. Even after he fell, the electricity danced over his body, stopping only when a man in uniform walked over it.

I lifted my gaze to the officer. His all-black uniform with its diagonal strap of kunai marked him as a member of the police force which controlled Ezveria. Others like him were charging into Klover and reeling bad guys in like fish. Their march evoked a different sense of fear; their shouts held a more practised form of aggression; unlike Dex and his flock, this man was licensed to hurt people. The badge on his upper arm like a radioactive symbol of sickles; it gave logo to the word bloodshed.

All my fear, anger, and angst shifted. I couldn’t bring myself to feel grateful. It was like watching a bully get taken down by more bullies.

The officer approached me and flicked an uncaring eye down at the boy. “Drop it.” I was too aware of the boomerang he wasn’t putting back in his holster to understand. “I said drop your weapon.”

I hadn’t noticed I’d picked up another arrow, or how tightly I clung to both it and the sell-soul—not out of an urge to protect him or anything; he just happened to be there.

He squirmed and lifted his head enough to watch the officer. Both of our stares must have been too much for him.

The man snarled and flipped the boomerang to his opposite shoulder. “I told you to drop it!” A half-second later, he slammed his weapon against my temple. The blow rattled my vision. The shadows coloured between the lines. And my world was shut off.

Footnotes:

[*1] - smooth/slick font style

[*2] - poofy font style

[*3] - Image of Rei's fluttering scarf

[*4] - spaced out staccato font style

[*5] - impactful font style

[*6] - Slashes here represent glitchy-looking lines or jagged lines that run through the words and cause them to be retyped

*Also the "In a world...." part might have its own unique Movie title-esque font style

Here's a Youtube Teaser Reading that you can share with your friends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5jM9acXUys&ab_channel=TaijaSensei

(please, please, please share with your friends >___<)