#pythiaba

Wakaba Isshiki vaguely tried to be a mother figure to me, and she was one of my tormentors via her research.

When I first approached Shido when I was a few months shy of 15, I was sent off to her. She recognized that I was a child. I probably reminded her of you. She still chose to proceed, because her cognitive psience research was more important than some random kid.

Not to say that she didn’t try to keep some sort of eye on me- she would pester me about eating right, ask about what else was happening in my life, if I’d made any friends at the school I had to transfer to. Things she would do ask her own child. And it was nice to have someone ask at all, when I hadn’t learned how to keep myself detached in any way. None of the other researchers did.

But it made it that much worse when she flipped that switch from Wakaba the Mother to Dr. Isshiki the Cognitive Psience researcher.

The first experiments were simple. Things testing the effects of repeated entry and exit, what could be brought out, who else (if anyone) could be brought in. After they established that I was the only one around there that could enter, and I could bring objects on my person, they loaded me down with various things and had me use them, which lead to the discovery of healing items and status effects. 

And once they figured those out, then they started testing what they could do directly to me, with Wakaba being the final say in most of it.

Many things tested were proposed because of status effects I’d noted for them. Would ailments applied in the Metaverse persist outside of it? The answer was sometimes, but typically not. Then it was the question of if conditions could be applied outside of the Metaverse and become labeled as such upon entry.  I don’t think she exactly wanted to do it, but she wanted to know, and she couldn’t do it herself. And so, I ended up being hurt in various ways, after the initial, simple things such as Dizzy, or Sleeping. Burned, shocked, placed in freezing rooms, told not to eat for a few days. Once, some of Shido’s goons came in and beat me half to death. I’m positive they broke my arm then. Surprise; it all carries over, and can be remedied, within the Metaverse. I’m sure you figured that out even without her research, from how often you harassed Kitagawa about eating. He had to have constantly been in Hunger.

Once we moved on to Shadows and individual Shadows, that was when she began expressing more concern over both myself and the direction the research was headed. If I found an individual’s shadow, I could influence them in the real world, obviously. One researcher I read off sheets of information about... what ridiculous thing was it... Okapi to until he was oddly knowledgeable about them. One I caused to become intensely paranoid of everyone else in the facility being secretly out for his life by feeding him lies about them, which caused him to quit. 

Right around when I was told to begin attempting to inflict status effects on Shadows with counterparts was when I partially awoke to Loki. It became too much to try and be the hero, and I realized that I was helping Shido figure out how to directly remove people from the picture. So he came. But I was still clinging to the idea that I was helping, dedicating myself as the test subject to a science that would eventually become public knowledge.

I clutched that idea so tightly that when I first used Call of Chaos on one of the researcher’s Shadows, I immediately accepted his disappearance from the team as a sudden illness, the excuse given to me. I hadn’t caused illnesses before, that couldn’t have been me; he was older than everyone else, perhaps it was life-threatening, cancer, a heart attack! Maybe I had aggravated it, but surely I hadn’t directly done anything. Idiot. I didn’t want to accept Loki in full.

That was when Wakaba started taking her research home with her. Having me repeat old tests with the excuse that she’d lost the papers, likely to give herself time to attempt to hide the more lethal discoveries. The last time I spoke to her, she’d called me into the facility to ‘celebrate the end of the experiments without all the other stuffy guys around’. She was going to submit everything she’d compiled and edited and we’d all be done. And it was... nice. I think she was attempting to make up for where things had led, what I ended up going through, by just... taking me out to do things most kids my age might like doing, things that I hadn’t been able to do before. A restaurant I mentioned being interested in once, taking me out to Akihabara. I distinctly remember what she said about it on the train.

“My daughter, she loves it out there. She’s always begging me for video games and figurines. And I remember that time you started ranting about Featherman. Honestly, it was like being at home. So I thought you’d like it. Maybe one day, you two can meet and make all the fan-theories about Grey Pigeon your little hearts desire.”

She bought two sets of Neo Featherman figurines then. I imagine we’ve both taken very good care of them.

I stopped seeing her after that. It was a nice note to end on. About two weeks after that, Shido told me to use Call of Chaos on her. 

Her Shadow claimed she understood the position I was in, but I could have tried, could have made some sort of excuse to not do it, found a temporary method.