Dear diary.
It’s been two years since my last entry. This is because shortly after my last entry the notebook you were in was suddenly on fire, along with everything else I owned.
From memory, my last entry was on the Tokyo incident, and how it must be worse than it seemed. It was that it did not seem possible that they would have to shut down so much of Tokyo for so long, and the details were so sparse… I used the word Conspiracy, and laughed.
My first entry was after I got my first bike of my own, after years of borrowing my brother’s, and sped down the hill back towards home. I remember the entry – I’ve reread it so often over the years, and thought about it so many times recently – because on my way down I swallowed an insect. It hit the back of my throat as I screamed down the hill, and I coughed, and I swerved, and I nearly crashed, nearly died.
Two years ago I swallowed a bee.
And I coughed, and I swerved, and I crashed, and I nearly died.
I think the bee was a physical manifestation of Gaia, who was the personification of the earth in Greek mythology, and if you think that’s a strange statement, today’s going to be rough on you.
It… enfused me? with Anima. Anima is some kind of life force, and I still don’t know of what kind, but the bees were released as some kind of antibody, some kind of white blood cell reaction to what happened in Tokyo. Tokyo seems to have been an explosion of a different form of life force, or force, or something. Research into it called Anima the Life, and this stuff The Blood. or the Zero Point Pathogen. Mostly, though, it’s called the Filth. If Anima comes from inside the world, The Filth comes from outside. If Anima is light, Filth is black. Both seem sentiant, or communicative. Or, if I’m right, have aspects they use to talk. Anima uses the bees, the buzzing; The Filth has the black signal.
I don’t know, and I don’t understand, but I’m trying to.
One of the effects of being infused with this anima was that I’m immortal, in a sense. If I die, I come back at an Anima well, and can either reform in my corpse, healed whole, or anew at the well. This is fortunate, because it also gave me the tendency to set things around me on fire. It took me a week before I could leave my flat to learn how to control it, to direct it. By that point they had found me.
Three groups took an interest in those recruited by the bees. The Knights Templar are grand and ordered, the Dragon are terrifying and chaotic, the Illuminati are technological and self-centered. I don’t trust Chaos and prefer concrete to polished mahogany. I took the trip to New York and joined the eye.
I might go back over what I’ve seen later on. Solomon Island was weird, Egypt was complicated, and Transylvania was… stereotypical. But this week, we got the go-ahead to enter Kaiden, the area in Tokyo that the “bomb” hit.
And now I’m terrified.