The World Hasn't Even Started Yet ( PROJECT SEKAI )

Time

A/N: YIPPEEE hopefully now all the festivities are over now and i can write more woohoo...... im hoping the timeline of events isnt too confusing so far, but just to make it clear:

- its been a few months since akito and tsukasa met in the tenma household

- tsukasa isnt fully missing, he just goes to school, avoids his friends, goes back home, cooks for his sister and then locks himself in his room

- at the same time, rui is now FULLY missing--- no one has seen him in days- this is happening after the mizuki desk chapter

if you have questions feel free to ask and ill do my best to clarify!

—

The dog plush slept soundly in KAITO's lap, leaning against his chest.

However, despite how calm it seemed to be, Nene couldn't help but worry for the situation at hand.

Nene should have known ages ago what was happening wasn't just something she and her friends could brush off. However, it is now that she finds herself sitting in front of her whole troupe's unofficial parent, looking disheveled and messy in an almost insane way, that her brain fully processed the situation at hand.

It was almost like time went still at the silence between the two. KAITO's office in the main tent wasn't particularly spacious, but being there still meant they were separated by a whole desk, giving an eerily serious vibe to this meeting they had found themselves in.

The desk was covered in different things that Nene hadn't particularly placed close attention to before this, but looking at them now, she could definitely see the meaning behind them. Drawings from the plushies, scripts for shows, star-shaped stickers, candy, a seemingly broken microphone yet to be fixed, etcetera, and yet, something caught her attention overall.

An hourglass, the sand almost full at the top, though, curiously, it did not seem like sand at all; instead, it reflected a space-like image of a dark blue star-filled background, red strings connecting seemingly invisible things in front of the pretty backdrop. Nene felt almost entranced by the way the sand fell to the bottom of the glass container, though seemingly not under the regular rules of gravity; each grain made a strangely slow descent into the bottom.

And, for some reason, her headache seemed to diminish a little bit when she watched the phenomenon intently.

Nene was dragged out of her daze when KAITO finally started talking, not meeting her gaze.

"So. You may be wondering why I called you here so suddenly." KAITO said, and Nene's headache seemed to suddenly get ten times worse. The pain sliced through her skull, making her struggle to even keep their eyes open as she squinted through her suffering. "I'll be quick. I can see this is affecting you, too."

"Thank you." Nene murmured back, silently urging KAITO to get on with it. He did.

"The feelings that originally formed the Wonderland SEKAI are getting farther and farther away. They're mixing with more negative feelings that either had been repressed so much they weren't even slightly in Tsukasa's memory and therefore couldn't show up in SEKAI or just straight up didn't exist until now, which is unlikely. I've..." KAITO paused.