Chapter Text
Art created by young children share many similarities. Thick black lines border everyone and everything within the picture. Clouds exist where the artist didn’t fill in the gaps between blue crayon strokes and as Makoto Naegi surveys the city he grew up in, he finds himself reminded of the many sheets of paper he stuck to his refrigerator with magnets once upon a time.
His parents and teachers used to praise what he had considered masterpieces, but no one applauds when the world transforms into a replication of the wobbly lines he and billions other children scribbled. No one claps at the inverted world, where buildings moan as they detach from the earth and are consumed by the sloppily coloured in sky. No one commends how he and everything else now look as though they were drawn by a preschooler who had just received their first box of crayons. It is as though someone plopped him and the rest of the universe into a child’s drawing and then pinned the picture onto the refrigerator upside down.
Even he is upside down and had it not been for the black ribbon cocooning his body, he would share the same fate as everything and everyone else. Like a blade of grass, the ribbon remains fixed to the ground that is now the ceiling. Except this ribbon squeezes and pulses, very much alive, while whatever grass that hasn’t been torn up is burnt and very much dead.
The ribbon pins his arms to his sides and prevents him from moving, so he can do nothing but watch the city scream as it ascends into the bottomless pit above his head.
Debris. People. Everything he has ever known. All meeting their end.
“Upupupu,” comes a voice. A small bear, left half black and right half white, toddles over as if gravity hasn’t been reversed. “I love the smell of despair in the evening. It works up quite the appetite.” It conjures a jar of honey out of thin air and dips its paw in.
There exists another also unaffected by the gravity change: in the distance roams a large animated ragdoll. And not large by won-at-a-carnival standards - it dwarfs any and all structures. Every time its arms smash into a building, more of the city crumbles away. It wears a cheshire cat smile while it regards the aftermath of its actions, dragging feet smearing destruction across the ground.
Fleeing from the monster is a violet-haired girl. At the beginning of her braid is a bow made of the same black ribbon encasing Makoto’s body. The ribbon extends to shoot out and curl around nearby structures, constricting to whisk the girl out of harm’s way and toward anything not yet demolished. She emerges from clouds of dust with a body covered in grazes and bruises. When she lands, she stumbles and gasps for breath in the seconds that lead up to the ragdoll’s next strike. The girl gives up fighting back, clenching but not using the pistol in her hand, once it becomes painfully clear that she doesn’t have enough time to prepare a counterattack.
Beads of sweat form on Makoto’s forehead.
“It’s quite the show, eh?” The bear follows his gaze, slathering its honey-glazed paw with saliva. “We have front row seats to the end of humanity. I can’t believe it took something like this to kill all you bastards. Humans sure are stupid. Not like bears. If bears ruled the planet, this never would have happened.”
A different girl launches herself into the sky, this one garbed in a camouflage dress. She extracts an impossibly large machine gun out of her too small sleeve and unloads a seemingly endless amount of ammunition into the ragdoll.
But the bullets just bounce off the ragdoll’s skin, splattering the girl instead.
He gasps.
The girl is still alive. Wounded but alive: most of the bullets missed. More stunned than in pain, she stares at her approaching opponent through matted black hair and blood.
Each step sounds like thunder.
Makoto inhales acrid despair.
“To defeat despair that concentrated, you would need an equal amount of hope,” the bear says while staring directly at him.
The girl pulls out a combat knife from underneath her skirt.
He rips his attention away from the scene and places it onto the bear.
“Luckily for you, you’re packed with the stuff! Gooey chewy icky wicky hope.” The bear tilts its head to one side. “So what’dya say?” It holds out a paw. “You want to make a contract with me and save the world?”
Makoto opens his mouth.
Then he wakes up in his bed.