She wakes up and can immediately tell something is wrong.
She wakes up underwater, unable to open her eyes, unable to reach for anything she can touch. It seems she gained consciousness just in time to decide to hold her breath. The pressure is too much… An awful metaphor.
Confusion couldn’t even begin to describe what she feels. She’s drowning. She’s about to die underwater with no idea how she got here.
She tries to move her arms and legs in every direction.
When she feels the embrace of death…
Because someone has fished her out of the water and saved her life.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
She disconnected from reality for a few minutes, though she doesn’t remember making the choice to. Her face is in the shade, but the majority of her body is lying in the sun, the dryness of her clothes compared to her hair proof of its brutality.
“- You’re dripping water all over her!”
Emily Drake, Ultimate Fashionista. She was the first victim of the killing game.
“- Get your fucking priorities in order…”
Benjamin Pan, Ultimate Fortune Teller. On a technicality, they were deemed the second victim.
Evidence has it that Mina shouldn’t be hearing their voices, and that the long wet hair hanging against her shoulder shouldn’t belong to one of them. Ever the curious girl, the Ultimate Detective opens her eyes, and it’s as she thought; looking over her with worried faces are Emily and Benjamin… although there is one more person – being her friend Ciel.
For being so wet all over, her throat feels awfully dry.
If the fashionista gasps excitedly, Ciel remains silent, save for the loud swallowing of his own spit. For some reason, she chuckles.
“- Waking up next to Emily and Ben… I get the leitmotif… But what are you doing here?”
Oscar chased her and killed her. It was terrifying and violent… but at least it’s over… and it was her own fault. She wasn’t careful. Her intellect didn’t live up to its reputation. Although it’s commonplace for Ultimates to be replaced following their death regardless, the act itself of her being killed must have meant she was fired on the spot.
For now, still, let’s say the “Ultimate Detective” watches her friend’s face be deformed with a pained grimace and his eyes well up with tears.
Maybe this is some sort of hallucination. Though she likes the grandiose of it, she doesn’t believe in a concept like “Hell”, “life after death”. She’s never heard of anything like it, but maybe the answer is that she’s hallucinating whatever her brain can come up in its last moments.
Emily and Benjamin are people she knows to have died victims, just like her, and now her brain imagines painful goodbyes to the one person to have truly been her friend.
He sniffles. He gets closer to her – the fortune teller helps by moving out of his way.
“- Mina, I was… too… I was too late…”
Should she play along…? This is a hallucination, right? Were Ciel to have been the first to find her body, or some such story, she wouldn’t be able to gain that knowledge after death.
Right now, though, she still feels like herself, and nothing will ever stop Mina Keys from investigating.
“- What… Like… You’re the one who found my body or something?”
She tries to sit up but she fails. She feels light headed and her voice is hoarse. It makes sense that her body would feel so strained – she was strangled, after all.
Ciel lets out a choked-up sounding gulp. Looking at him from the ground – actually, the sand – her keen eye notices large white marks surrounding his neck.
The question escapes her before she can think about it. She finds her hand reaching up for him.
Is this rather a nightmare? Traumatised by what happened to her, she projects it onto someone she wouldn’t want to see being hurt.
“- Mina… When I saw Oscar carry you…
The Ultimate Fashionista (though she’ll likely be replaced soon herself) can’t help but intervene, and if Mina takes note of it – as she takes note of everything – her wide eyes can’t stare away from the youthful face above her.
“- …I tried to chase him… Well, right then, I didn’t know for sure that he was carrying you…
She finds herself having darted upright, grabbing at his t-shirt.
Even sitting, even with someone her age, she feels so stupidly small, as always.
“- Chasing after Oscar? Did you have a death wish?”
Tears escape from his eyes, and for some reason, Mina’s cheeks are wet.
“- I couldn’t abandon you…”
She lets out a gross sniffle.
This isn’t a hallucination… neither a nightmare… This is actually Hell.
“- What’s it worth now…?”
Her voice is shaky. She understands exactly what happened… she doesn’t need to know more.
Same guy, same modus operandi. Ciel was a witness, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. When Oscar Belmonte perpetrated his premeditated crime against the Ultimate Detective, an innocent bystander got caught in the crossfire…
…No, that’s not exactly right. She knows the truth… That her shifty attitude led her only real ally to put himself in harm’s way. Now look at the both of them.
Though she continues to sniffle loudly, her understanding of the situation allows her to become less tense. She lets go of the fabric she was holding and looks around her.
On her right, the Ultimate Fashionista bites her nails. Is this massacre going to continue? Without the Ultimate Detective to solve the case, is everyone else but the “bodyguard” going to join them here? On her left, the Ultimate Fortune-Teller stares at the sea, holding their knees against their torso.
Ciel won’t stop crying. He didn’t want to die. Everything she did, she did it for people like him, who can’t defend themselves. For people who are small, caught up in something bigger than them.
Her fringe has long dried but her braids still feel damp. She reaches for her ties and undoes them.
“- Anything you tell me to do, I’ll do.
Benjamin answered her question before she could ask it. It shouldn’t have caught her off-guard like it did – she needs to get her shit in order. She knows the extent of his talent.
“- I won’t believe in it, but if I can make it up to you by doing anything that’ll put your mind at ease, I will.
- What are you talking about?”
Emily again. Ciel tries to cover his own sobs.
“- I need a new guard dog, and Benjamin owes me one, is what it’s about.”
By using their powerful talents, they’ll try everything to understand this place and get Ciel and Emily out of it.
“- So?” Mina gets to ask.
He looks at the detective, then the “clown”, then the fashionista. He stays silent for abnormally long.
“- That’s all… I guess Oscar gets caught.”
Benjamin’s attitude told her so. They weren’t expecting anyone else to land here…
She chuckles sadly. If the others survived Oscar, then they all outsmarted her, and what used to be her talent has become nothing more than a strange hobby.