12:00 P.M.

12:00 P.M.

 

The King of Distortion.

Like Boogiepop, it had given itself that name.

 

It wasn’t sure when it first noticed the distortion in the world. By the time it had taken form, the world had long since lost its shine, buried under layers of the useless and meaningless. At least, that’s what it thought.

It couldn’t see those useless things as useless, and couldn’t see those meaningless things as entirely worthless, either. They were just distorted. Those distortions had turned what should be a road sloping upward into an endless Mobius strip.

To it, ‘meaningless’ things were like stairs. If you checked each step carefully and kept moving forward, you’d eventually break though to something beyond.

But it seemed to it that no one else could perceive this. No, it wasn’t that they couldn’t perceive it. It was that they were actively rejecting it. Turning their eyes from the shine their hearts produced, forcing themselves into a corner of suffering and acting like that was all there was.

This required a drastic cure.

And the ‘moon’ provided the perfect locale.

The only problem remaining was whether Boogiepop would view it as an enemy.

But no matter what problems it faced, it had no intention of ending this ‘experiment’.

 

The King of Distortion.

That was its name.