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It had seemed that Toshinari's plan had worked for a moment; Izuna had turned around to look at the bento while Toshinari was inexorably shuffling to his claimed spot. However, his hopes were quickly dashed when she suddenly turned around. He froze suddenly as she turned, but Izuna had already caught him moving, throwing him an accusatory glare and pointing a finger at him. He chuckled nervously.
Shit! She caught me! Toshinari chided himself in his mind.
Had he not been so careless, he might've been able to sneak into the spot with her being none the wiser, but that was out of the question now. The boy — busy contemplating what went wrong — he almost didn't register Izuna's words, asking him if he was hungry.
"No, no, no," Toshinari said, shaking his head.
Truth be told, he was a bit hungry, but to yield to hunger would be to lose the spot that he had been working so hard to take.
"I can just eat when we get to a city. You go ahead."
The boy patiently waited for Izuna's next move.
Toshinari had been making his way to one of the corners of the room with the intention of resting there for the night, but it seemed that he wasn't the only one with that idea. Izuna had hastily moved to him, calling dibs and demanding the spot from him — no doubt to avoid the eight-legged horrors that were probably hanging around and inside the temple.
"Oi, you can't just call dibs when I'm already near the spot, y'know?" He replied, scratching the back of his head as he did so.
"Besides, it's not like I want to sleep near any spiders either."
In the midst of their confrontation, Kaito had left to collect firewood — leaving his bento behind for the rest to eat at their leisure. Hiroko had followed suit, giving permission to the remaining two to start eating Kaito's bento.
Of course, this meant that Toshinari was left alone with Izuna to compete for the spiderless corner.
"You eat first, Izuna." Toshinari offered politely, gesturing toward Kaito's bento in the centre of the room. It was a trick. Were she to go to the bento, he would take the spot. If not, then he would just have to try something else.
Hell, even as he offered, the boy had been slowly but surely inching toward the spot anyway.
The group was walking down the path in the hopes of finding a temple. Toshinari couldn't help but liken it to a quest in a video game of some kind. He had been the first to start walking down the path, but gradually drifted to the middle of the marching order — no doubt subconsciously. It was the safest place to be, after all.
He had intended to walk past the statues, favouring reaching the temple instead, but curiosity had gotten the better of him when he saw everyone else examining the statues too. Taking a look at the foreign symbols until they mysteriously began to make sense to him.
"Yeah, I understand it too." He answered. The phrases on the statues were succinct, but the subject matter came as something of a surprise to Toshinari.
Oi, isn't this writing kind of depressing?
Between the bizarre text and being deposited in a forest with no explanation, there was a lot to be concerned about. When the boom echoed through the forest, Toshinari's immediate assumption was that it was thunder. Except there didn't seem to be any signs of a storm.
"An explosion?" He questioned aloud. It was a unusual attempt at a justification for a unusual circumstance. In any case, the noise definitely ramped up Toshinari's desire to reach some kind of shelter, if it wasn't already high enough.
Reaching the shrine was disappointing, to say the least. It was a shelter for the impending nightfall, but the place was decrepit. He didn't seem to be the only one unhappy with this development, and from the sound of things, there were similar shades of dismay amongst the group.
"Well I think it looks kind of homely," He said with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
He waited for Hiroko to inspect the shrine at Izuna's behest, following her inside only when it became clear that the shrine wasn't going to completely collapse upon their heads. The shrine wasn't much the look at — quite the opposite actually — but if you ignored the gaping hole in the roof, the several layers of dust, the cobwebs and potential spider infestation, the shrine seemed like an okay place to spend the night. Sort of.
"Better to take our chances here than sleeping in the woods." He replied to Izuna's protests, making his way to the most spider-free corner of the room, displacing some of the settled dust where he stepped.
"Hm."
Toshinari waited patiently as the strangers introduced themselves one after another. He felt a little unreasonable, asking them their names before even introducing himself. Hell, the oldest one of them all even called him out on it. The boy had been somewhat on edge, disoriented and confused by the sudden transition from his room to a forest in the blink of an eye, but he quickly came to realize that everyone else here was just as lost as he was. For better or worse, they were all together in this.
"My name's Tokuda Toshinari. Pleased to meet you all."
He scratched the back of his head, surveying the forest for a second time and noting the presence of the torii while the rest of the group discussed survival skills and rivers.
Well, at least we're still in Japan. He mused to himself.
It seemed one of the girls, Izuna, had noticed it too, suggesting they follow the path to find a temple. It was the best option they had at the moment, at least in Toshinari's opinion.
"Good idea," he complimented, starting down the path.
"We should get going—before the sun goes down, that is."
"Khh..! So close!" Toshinari said through clenched teeth.
It was an ordinary day, and for Toshinari, ordinary days often meant staying at home and playing video games in the sanctuary that was his own room. Of course, even if it felt like one, Toshinari's room hardly resembled a sanctuary of any kind: clothes he had worn days prior hung lazily on his desk chair and bed, game cases were haphazardly strewn across the wooden floor, and Toshinari had planted himself right in the centre of the chaos that was his room, gripping a controller with an expression of pure focus plastered upon his face.
The blonde haired boy had recently become enamored with a game called Light Spirits, an infamously famous game both praised and reviled for its difficulty. Toshinari had heard good things about the game from his decidedly small friend group, and opted to take the plunge and give it a try. In spite of the difficulty of the game, Toshinari had—up until this point and one before—taken to the game like a duck to water; it embraced and encouraged his cautious decision-making while simultaneously rewarding his patience. Hell, the game even let him run a warrior class like he always did when playing RPGs. He was already several hours into his first session, slaying creature after creature with slightly-less-than-reckless abandon—and he had even managed to clear a couple of bosses already, too.
Of course, the universe didn't want him to see too much success in the game, and as Toshinari had finished killing a particularly tough enemy, the dreaded string of words appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Shadow spirit xXDark_SlayerXx has intruded!
"Shit...! It's him again!" Toshinari began to sweat bullets. It was his reckoning.
In no time at all, the half-naked, shadow-clad enemy player descended upon the greenhorn Toshinari for a second time, arms raised in a taunting manner as Toshinari's corpse faded to dust.
"Damn it! I was carrying so many spirits!"
The blonde-haired boy set his controller aside and buried his head in his arms to contemplate his ruinous demise.
"That was the same taunt as last time, too..."
His sad ruminations went on for a grand total of five minutes, before he decided it was time to pick himself up and do something else. He pressed his hands to the ground to lift himself up, but where he should have felt hard wooden flooring, he instead felt the subtle give and coarse texture of...
...Grass?
Toshinari lifted his head, and his gaze wasn't met by a TV screen, nor did he see his console—or even his room. Instead, the boy was face to face with a large rock comfortably nestled in the ground. He jumped to his feet and scanned his surroundings in surprise and confusion.
"Eh? This isn't my house." An astute observation, if he said so himself. Had he been ruminating for longer than he thought? No, that still wouldn't explain how he got outside—in the middle of nowhere, no less. His contemplation was cut short by the sounds of voices on the other side of the rock. Toshinari peered from behind it, spotting several strangers only a few feet away.
Did they have something to do with this? He had to find out.
"Hey, who are you people?"
Still on board.
Kind of wanted to flesh out the concept more, but I'm going be busy this week and don't want to hold the thread up any longer. Here's Toshi.
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