Awakening
Fifty years had passed and the people of the world transformed into an industrious yet desensitized society. Overcrowded cities, factory haze, and the erosion of older ways of life reshaped the planet into a harder place to move through.
In Yamato, a young teenage boy moved through the packed streets with a camera in hand, taking photographs while a school tour drifted away from him. He wore a white dress shirt over a black shirt, blue jeans, and carried himself as someone both curious and out of place.
As the evening deepened, he wandered farther from his group, crossed crowded streets, and found himself drawn to a dark alley after seeing an unnatural shimmer of light explode like glitter against a wall.
There, after brushing off a warning from an old silver-haired beggar, the boy discovered three thugs cornering a girl in red. He tried to intervene. He failed. His courage outpaced his strength, and the alley turned brutal in seconds.
He was beaten, stabbed, and left hanging as the men turned their attention back to the girl. The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was the motion of those silhouettes crossing away from him in the dark.
When he woke, he was no longer in the alley at all, but in a hotel lobby, alive and disoriented, with the event already beginning to blur into something impossible.