zerotohiro | Some Legends Are Told, Some Turn To Dust Or To Gold [CEREALIA INBOX]

[ because she'd check up on him too, yeah. but she's milla, so it's very Blunt and To The Point and a few hours after arriving back as she's sure sleeping is one of the first things on the agenda. ]

safe return?
y/n

/

[Yup. That's what he's texting her because the answer's not really yes but it's not really no, either.]

You?

[ oh, hiro hamada. she gets it; she doesn't exactly expect a yes after any trainwreck this place sends them on. the response is enough to get something like a wry smile from her, too. ]

clever.
/

[ don't mind if she steals it. ]

but that's just another day in cerealia, isn't it?

So I've been called before. [He's still a little unsteady from everything but he's more rested and a little more spunky than he was by the time they were mysteriously whooshed back out of the dark area.

Can the same be said for Milla?]

Just another day in Cerealia. The sun is shining, the robotic birds are singing, and the end of the world is right at our fingertips. How could we ever get tired of constant doom and gloom?

[ she's very good at handling "bad things happening", in the "i just keep going and not thinking about it and i can do that for a long time somehow" way, so she's fine.

while not being fine. you know, /, it goes. ]

i'm starting to wonder if sarcasm runs in the family
i had to check that this wasn't sent by your brother

[ .... ]

you missed the part about obnoxious glitching in your tagline

[And this is how well-functioning adults handles all of life's problems. What a pair.]

It's hard to say who got it from who but I think I'm better at the delivery than he is. Cynical teenager and all that. Milla, if I listed everything obnoxious about this planet you'd be getting, like, 738217398 texts from me. But yeah there's that. This was an even more obnoxious glitch than usual. You know what bugs me? We still don't know how we got there and got back.

mm well
i definitely can't imagine a smug grin on your face while you shot that off, but that might've been the subject matter
not that i could handle 738217389 texts of your sarcasm anyway
... 738217398

[ fuck

why does she even care about replicating the number ]

it wasn't as obvious as our magical return last time, was it?

[ via mosley and his... golf cart? that honestly still feels like some weirdass fever dream. ]

i doubt we can blame the same people for our being there either

[ it really was a mystery, what the point of that even was. ]

:D

[That's all he says at the moment. But the rest of it is worth thinking on and he's quick to tap out another response.]

You noticed that too huh? Makes me wonder if the theories were really right that this wasn't the doing of CERES this time. But if that's true then we have a whole new issue of not knowing who else is out to get us. Any ideas?

[ ..... :D. god. sighs. ]

i'm ignoring that.
i don't know who she's with, but the first thing that comes to mind is that fortune teller

[ she showed up before, too... in a weirder form? and there was trouble that came with her. just like now. ]

those masks of hers
they're still unsettling, but less annoying now that we're back

[ at least, hers isn't following her around anymore. ]

nice coincidence.

[ dry dry dry text. ]

Are we sure ALL of them are hers? I didn't get mine from her directly and I know a couple of other people didn't either. Is it possible somebody's copying her instead to throw us off of their trail?

[ ...? that's news to her, actually. she just assumed everything was from aria... ]

i didn't know that.
did they all end up acting the same way? developing features, following you around?
and it's possible they could all be working together too
though i still don't understand what the masks were supposed to do besides annoy us

[ she was fortunately spared from alien-kun shenanigans. ]

Yeah. Mine showed up next to my bed one morning after the carnival, scared the crap out of me and the cat. It started following me everywhere and it developed the barcode after a while. Still not entirely sure what THAT means either. Supposedly? The masks are our true selves or something like that. What was yours anyway?

[ okay. nice, aria. her true self is apparently: ]

dripping with blood
which could mean a lot of things. i won't deny that the thing is accurate, if it's taking that direction

[ well isn't that a. reassuring thing to say. but she's not going to deny she's got a bloody as fuq past—hiro's seen enough of that already. ]

and its at least a lot easier to make out than yours
aren't barcodes meant for scanning at the store?

Oh.

[Judging by the fact that he doesn't respond immediately after that, he knows exactly what that means and now he's busy processing the whole "Milla's dead" thing. Right. Okay. Did he know that? Does he remember that? Somehow things like that just don't really sit well no matter what.]

...you're right, that's a lot easier to make out and thankfully I don't have to explain to you what a barcode is. That's what I don't get. I'm not a product so what does it have to do with anything? A couple of us figured out what some of the masks mean, but that one stumped us.

[Then again, the alien did say he held some value. So that's ominous.]

[ she thought that was vague enough that the immediate response would be haha you're a murderer but whoops. not that she knows what the mask exactly means, so milla's going to take his lack of immediate response as that being the conclusion he got anyway. she'd probably pause if someone told her "yeah my bloody mask is bloody because i, myself, am bloody" except.

maybe not. ]

which ones did you figure out?
maybe it was whoever gave you that mask's way of marking you as a product

[ ha ha ha. no, really, that's the only thing she can think of. why the heck would you put a barcode on someone? unless your true self is a box of cookies in the junk food aisle, what truth does that even show. ]

like that makes any sense

We figured out the bloody fingerprints, the blood dripping masks, and the ones that're broken. Sort of. Some of the other ones I kinda figured out later after talking to people but still not enough to get a real answer. And what about if I don't want to be a product? They could have asked.

[There's a pause though.] ...but it could mean there is a price at stake here.

Some Legends Are Told, Some Turn To Dust Or To Gold [CEREALIA INBOX]

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