objects in session: 11.0

can't get enough pain.

Within minutes, Mochi sat on the examination table, the harsh fluorescent light overhead exposing every detail. Her shirt was lowered, her back a canvas of raw skin. The air felt cold against her exposed wounds. Syringe’s hands, efficient and impersonal, moved with a practiced rhythm. A strip of white sarashi was carefully unrolled, then bound tightly around Mochi’s torso, layer upon layer, a compression that was both physical and symbolic. It was a neat, clinical erasure, a meticulous hiding of what could not be truly healed, what could not be undone. The fabric pressed against her skin, a constant, physical reminder of the truth it concealed.

“As for your face..” Syringe stated, her voice flat, devoid of any attempt at comfort or empathy, “there’s no miracle wrap.”

Mochi didn't flinch. Her gaze remained fixed on a distant point on the wall. The statement was a simple fact, unavoidable. “I’ll wear a hat,” she murmured, the words hollow, a practical solution to an insurmountable problem.

Beside her, Crepe, who had been a nervous bundle of motion, her fingers twisting and untwisting in her lap, noticeably perked. A faint, hopeful light kindled in her eyes. “Y-Yes,” she stammered, a small, relieved smile flickering. “That works! A hat… it suits you, anyway. You'd look good in it.” Her voice, though still tentative, was laced with genuine warmth, a small, fragile reassurance amidst the sterile practicality.

The examination loomed, a scaffold erected for the academic condemned. A procession of students shuffled into the hushed hall, each face a tableau of trepidation, the air itself thick with unspoken dread. Yet, at the dais, Ms. Highlighter radiated an almost hallucinatory luminescence, a beacon forged of unsettlingly vivacious flesh.

Her energy was a cacophonous crescendo, her voice booming with insidious bonhomie: “Good morning, my incandescent intellects! Let us discern today whether your potential ignites into effulgence or quietly calcifies to ash!”

She expediently enumerated the rules, a relentless mask of ebullience plastered across her features, before her predatory gaze impaled Mochi.

“And you… the hat.”

Mochi’s digits instinctively caressed the brim of her cap. “Health issue,” her voice a threadbare whisper.

Highlighter’s smile quivered for just half a second. She leaned forward, eyes narrowing, her gaze flickered, ravenous. A single glimpse of the exigency marks, an iridescent affliction crawling like cracked constellations over Mochi’s exposed skin.

She offered no rejoinder. Only a slow, deliberate inclination of her head acknowledged the truth.

The examination concluded.

Ms. Highlighter did not dissipate with the departing students. Instead, she gravitated with an unsettling grace towards the school’s most archaic, light-starved corridors, descending into an antechamber cloaked in secrecy.

Rows of biostasis chambers glowed, vitreous sarcophagi arranged with an almost ritualistic precision. Red, orange, green, cyan, blue, purple, each housing a form suspended in a syrupy stasis. Her sisters.

And the yellow one, hers, remained a desolate void.

Her palm flattened against Orange’s crystalline enclosure, her voice soft and trembling with a chilling, saccharine tremor. “Awake yet, dearest sister? This protracted solitude is becoming very... tedious.”

The air itself seemed to thicken, pressing down on the silence before a distinct rhythm of footsteps, sharp and deliberate, broke the unnatural hush. Mochi and Guitar Case stepped through the shimmering atmospheric distortion that served as the chamber's entrance, their forms momentarily distorted, shadows stretching long and grotesque across the pulsating floor. Highlighter didn't bother to turn, her back a deliberate affront, her posture radiating an almost casual disdain that was far more unnerving than outright aggression.