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Your name is Akemi Homura and you’ve failed.

Again.

The pale white of the hospital ceiling greets you.

Again.

Your worthless heart beats in your chest, persisting in its pitiful attempts to keep your blood flowing.

Again.

Like a swarm of hungry rats your sins scratch and gnaw on your bones, attempting to devour their way out of your rib cage. You give yourself a few seconds to revel in the much-deserved suffering, and when the time’s up, you violently clamp on your despair and hate and throw it into the unconscious depths of your mind, where it can simmer without interfering with your duty.

With a rote effort you impel your will into your eyes and your heart, forcing them to work as they should, and get out of your bed.

An effort so rote, it takes you a few moments to realize that it did absolutely nothing. It takes another moment to realize that your Soul Gem is nowhere to be found.

Your heart stops and then goes into overdrive. The heart monitor lets out a disgusting high-pitched scream before you manage to force your mind and body back into obedience.

Observing yourself more calmly and carefully, you realize that you weren’t entirely correct. The back of your left hand, the place right where your Soul Gem should’ve been located, isn’t empty. There’s ...something. A clearly unnatural formation, half-emensed into the material universe.

It’s not a Soul Gem. The object is far too crude, far too thin, far too ethereal. If a Soul Gem could be compared to a modern computer, then this thing would barely count as a collection of vacuum tubes.

Yet you still can feel a certain affinity between the structures, a certain convergence of purpose. A will, enclosed. A thought, endlessly looping on itself.

You carefully prod it, trying to determine its nature. The object doesn’t surrender its secrets easily, but you’re nothing but patient.

...

...You think you’re starting to get a good a good idea of what its purpose is. It’s a repository of impulses; something greater than a memory, something lesser than a desire.

You delve deeper and deeper, trying, if not to learn, then at least to catalog the half-deciphered recollections within. You find mostly incomprehensible formulae that you somehow know will produce underwhelming results, primitive attempts at enchantment and time manipulation. Deeper still, you see a coil isolated from the rest. It feels less solid, less... purposeful. You suspect that this makeshift structure was used to store actual memories, an ethereal journal of sorts, but the format feels completely impenetrable to you. A few momentary glimpses is the best you could manage for now. Faces and voices, lessons, experiment logs and ...a beach vacation?

Deep in a meditative trance, you do not notice the sound of the door opening.

"...Homura?"

You did not jump.

You whip your head to the entrance to find two new indistinct shapes in your room. Ah, yes, your eyes. You hastily grab your glasses from the nightstand.

The first shape resolves into a tall young man with wild, fiery red hair. Something about his smile puts you on edge, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. The second one turns out to be a nurse. Her expression looks nervous and a little frustrated, and her eyes keep darting back and forth between you two.

"Sir, please, this is so sudden, we aren’t sure what her state is, she should be resting right now, not taking visitors."

"I’m her brother, I’d be the first to see if she was straining herself. Besides, it’s just a short visit, I’ll be out in ten minutes."

The nurse opens her mouth to object, but the man doesn’t wait for her. "And miss, shouldn’t you be getting a doctor right now?" His voice is still perfectly friendly and polite, but the pressure of his gaze alone is enough to shatter the woman’s pathetically weak resistance.

She gives a shallow shaky bow to no one in particular and darts out of the room.

The man moves to sit beside your bed. His unnerving expression shifts into a concerned, but still genuinely warm smile.

"Hey. How are you feeling? Does your head hurt?"

"I am fine..?" You reply carefully, not really sure what else to say. Such close attention to your persona at the very start of the loop feels disquieting, to say the least. And why is he concerned about your head, of all things? Weren’t you hospitalized for heart surgery?

"I see. You really gave us all a big fright, you know. Fuji-nee especially. I barely convinced her to not involve Raiga off the bat and let our healthcare system work as it should—"

He continues to speak and you continue to scrutinize his face. Who is he? Is he really who he claims he is? You know that your isolation isn’t perfect, that your shift still can affect the events outside of the fragment of time you have ripped out of the proper timeflow. But these deviations usually manifest as deviously subtle changes, blindsiding you and ruining your carefully cultivated plans at the worst possible moment, not... whatever this is.

Could an aberration manifest so far into the past as to create you a new sibling? If he is your sibling, that is. Right now you see very little familiar resemblance. As you continue to scan his face again and again, searching for any trace of deception, a name reluctantly crawls out of the stolen memories.

"..."

Deep in your thoughts, you hadn’t noticed that the man in front of you had stopped talking a while ago, and now an awkward silence fills the room.

"...Homura?"

You should reply something quickly.

[] "...I’m sorry, but who are you?" Blunt and to the point, better not to test your social skills.

[] "...Shirou?" For some reason, the name feels right on your tongue.

[] Write-in

• Goals

• Ascertain the nature of the anomaly.

• Get out of the hospital.

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A/N: Hello everyone. It’s my first time running a quest, so please tell me if I’m doing something wrong, and when I do inevitably fuck up, please don’t bully me too much. I’ll be in your care.