He is a failure.

  “I'm crying. Why?

  Am I crying? Why?

  Has it been this long?

  Why does it feel so new?

  I am crying. I am crying because I can; not because I must; not for the reason which I must.

  I am crying because I am selfish. Selfishness is new.”

  The Gown Mistress is an Angel, created by the Heavenly design to inhabit the Limbo in between the “Lively places”, affectionately named “Nowhere” by her. However, she is the only one in charge of Nowhere, all alone, only accompanied by the cold light emitters of the monitors, streaming live feed of the named ones.

  And, whenever a new character is introduced, the show focuses on them for another arc or two. At that moment, her favorite had become Lish. Glass on the other hand was her least favorite, waffling about too much and distracting the newly revitalized “Hell Hospitaller”.

  The selection process of the named ones is done by Heavenly Design alone; not even his closest helpers know of the exact details.

  But the protocol—the process in which the Angels take center stage—after the individual has been selected is as follows:

  First, resurrection.

  Once the individual has fallen, their bodies will be retrieved from the crevasse and hastily transported to Limbo. The body will be “immortalized” shortly after arriving, metamorphosed to have a similar composite as the Angels themselves. Also, in the process of resurrecting the body, they will implant the “Foreseen Will” of the design, giving them the initial incentive to do great in their new life; the device itself is about the size of a soda bottle cap, can be affixed anywhere on the body, and discrete enough to be overlooked, as many do in their awakening.

  Second, realization.

  After the body of the individual has been resurrected, the mind and the soul are put inside the newly canonized, Angel akin, carcass. While the consciousness is still salvageable after brain death, that is deemed undesirable as the mind fully breaks down when faced with an end. As such, and as it is all they can, they preserve the mind the moment before the individual succumbs to the mortal coil.

  But a crucial problem arises when it comes to soul reintegration. The mind could be refurbished into the superior build of the Angels’, the soul cannot bare such processing power and vigor, often getting overloaded and shorting out the brain into a pulp. To combat this, the meter acts secondarily as a transistor, regulating and restricting the flow of power until the mind and soul harmonizes.

  Third, revitalization.

  This is when the individual usually wakes up with full conscience. Before then, the body rests in Limbo, next to Angel, absorbing the immediate energy of the design.

  Thereafter the individual has awoken, the question,

  “Which path will you follow?”

  …is presented to them.

  While the process may vary depending on the individuals’ properties and unique challenges, the basic procedure of Resurrection, Realization, and then Revitalization—save, change, and return—stays consistent.

  “Lest he weaken, the design will turn, to this wired realm, flooding the living.”

  Once a man sees death, he will see nothing but—that sentence is written in red on a file resting on top of Angel’s desk.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Unluck follows him, undead after all those times, after all the mort he has seen, the “Practitioner of Paradiso”, Lish Hermes Hops, fails to succumb to the unimaginable will of the design. How fitting.

  He is, in all regards, a failure; a failure in death, a failure in life, a failure in maintain the peace he had promised. A failed experiment, an amalgamation of a half-baked carcass and an untreated conscious, living with the nagging voice of himself echoing inside his head, trying to oppose the design’s definite plan.

  “Is it heretical to support the antagonist? All his life, he has been the harbinger of death to all around him, at any given time. He is the definition of an antagonist, a villain who brings nothing but harm to his comrades, but it is also not his fault; it is his fault only for him to have gone down the path of embrace.

  On her desk, there are another 2 files: “Visionary” and “Maddened cook”.

  The Visionary will make aid to the Cataloguist. In various alternatives, she will be killed by him. Yet, in this very variant, he will always spare her. He will be blinded at times; in such cases, she will become his eyes.

  …reads a page.

  Spoilers are strictly forbidden in Nowhere, as Angel wants her only entertainment to be as enjoyable as possible. But there’s a certain emptiness to have only welcomed the named ones and received and followed orders written in an emotionless print from someone unseen…

  “I wish to live. I wish to be alive until my knees creak; until my back cannot bend; until my teeth fall out; and die only then. God be damned for I would die whenever I wish. To hell with the Heavenly design, to hell with the foreseen will.”

  Isha is still human; succumbed to lunacy, sure, but he is still a death-scared feeble human being. Maybe that’s why realization brings about such catastrophic crash outs—it’s the pain of dying, and not in agreement with one’s own mortality, that they come back haywire and cause a lot of fuss.

  “Your actions speak otherwise, Isha. From what I can appraise, you killed her parents—her only caretakers—in cold blood, and ate them, didn’t you? Then again, what else would she so scared from the man who cured an incurable disease? Perhaps gavage? Or maybe a form of brainwashing? How long have you been on this island, again?”

  “Lishe… what vile things are you thinking of now?”

  Indeed, he was thinking about a time back in ’76. The Anatoly famine and the predecessing war became Lish’s first exposure to human malice. Sins of all shapes and sizes, failures of only the carcasses of human nature, all those who are selfish and blindsided came out during the time of crisis.

  A strand of fungi made 70% of the livestock there inedible. And… in times of desperation, the universal law of power takes effect; the strong ate the weak, the weak ate amongst themselves, parents protected their children, some gave in, and they ate amongst themselves. It was cruel. But cruelty is what life is.

  He experienced death there. He experienced gluttony at the bottom. His eyes and ears and nose were flooded with the stench of rotting meat, stale crusted blood, and the saliva of those who’ve went feral; he effectively became anosmic to the smell.

  And when faced with such reality, one thinks pragmatically, sees everyone and thing as a potential threat, and develops or tries to find an escape. But his imagination has always been vivid.

  “An easy way out will always be preferred. Yet a surefire way, no matter the difficulty, will be the utmost priority.”

  In the slightest of movements, blows of dust, whirs of creaks of the unsound floorboards, Lish tugged and twisted at the embrittled chain.

  “As someone who’s about to kill you, I’ll say this: you, especially you, are strange. You see… I remember you being a cold and calculated soldier, but this? You’re being childish, easily manipulated, and too damn caring about others’ business. The ‘Hell Hospitaller’, the man credited to have saved miracle missions, cannot feel. He isn’t human. He wasn’t human. But you are human; too human. Alas I have lost mine but you… you’ve gained yours back. You really have a weird mind, a flawed mind, a correct mind.”

  A quiet snap, preceding a slight, frantic grab of the chain; it had snapped right at the cuff.

  “We both deserve death. But I only deserve mine, and you… well you shall receive yours and mine, and anyone who was unfortunate enough to die by those hands. May you lie in the sand, larvae covered, loose to the whispers of mort.”

  Flies lay their eggs in sand; when you walk on a patch in midsummer, the slight tickle you feel about your feet is most likely caused by the hatching.

  “And may you be as delicious as I’d ever imagined, Lisha.”

  “Only if he doesn’t kill Isha", it says on the 50th page, "will he be able to maintain his sanity”.

  Lest he approaches the point which he has left in the past, he shall not progress any further. He needs to better himself; he must, else he would be no different than the savages once he had shunned.

  That’s why…

  “ka? ?amin x'lui ka? p'i. Iei so xay mono r’ka’an. Mad Cuk, ko oiw. Ryjo sea~”

  Has the girl killed Isha just now?