Hecatolite - SCP Foundation

KurumiRyn 11/02/21 (Tue) 19:08:24 #72810514

Sometimes, when I dream in deep sleep, I am transported back to the afternoon when I was fourteen years old.

The early spring sunlight streamed through the shadows of the Japanese cedars outside the window, illuminating the dust mites along the edge of the windowsill and the grains of rice splattered during the boys' noon rice ball fight; the atmosphere of a Japanese class was, as always, dull and dreary. While Mr. Hiroi, the teacher behind the podium, struggled with his thick glasses, which often slipped from his nose as he wrote on the blackboard, the girl in front of me, fourteen-year-old Shiina Shouko, moved her chair back an inch and turned to face me. The streaming light outlined a barely perceptible gold rim on her shoulder-length short hair. She raised her left hand to her lips and assumed a posture as if whispering secrets into the air as she gestured for me to come closer. After making sure no one around us noticed our actions, Shiina lifted her side hair and gently nibbled my earlobe amidst the light dizziness of the afternoon and the scent of mandarin-scented shampoo.

"… I'm actually a magical girl, you know?"

KurumiRyn 11/02/21 (Tue) 19:43:05 #72810515

At fourteen, I was still at an age where I took late-night anime seriously. I would even scream and hide across the room when I saw the bad special effects with blurry blood splattering in the movies. However, the credibility of Shiina's words is a topic worth discussing.

I knew which girls in the class would give her the nickname "weirdo" behind her back, but after a little trial and error, I realized the reality that I was powerless to stop it. The enmity in childhood was actually quite pure: failing to prepare pocket money after school to join the group on the tram to Shibuya 109 on a Friday was a symbol of choosing isolation. As for Shiina Shouko of the "Going Home Club"1, it seemed that she was destined to have no connection with the beauties of life even before a trend swept the campus. Even for me, who was already familiar with her, Shiina's sometimes bizarre thoughts and the seeming lack of basic knowledge in her speech weren't always easy to deal with. In the end, all I could do was helplessly reach out and slap her smooth forehead.

But that day, Shiina didn't go home right after school as usual. Instead, she pulled me along to avoid the teacher who was putting away the lesson plans and the security guard who was patrolling the hallway. We walked carefully upstairs and hid in the quiet shade of the roof as the sun set. At first I was worried about the punishment hanging over my head and my parents' reprimand, until I saw the unfastened square scarf and pleated skirt fall to the ground under the pull of gravity, and the originally seamless water-blue collar separate from it. It was then that I realized that this school uniform might not be the right size for Shiina. Under the pale, oversized fabric, a few small bumps appeared on her skin from contact with the outside world, but my attention was drawn more to something foreign embedded in her chest.

The pure white crystal refracted the rainbow light inside, held in place beneath Shiina's collarbone by the surrounding skin and faint blue veins, and from its center spread the white gauze fabric that enveloped her unexpectedly slender body in a style I had never seen before - except for the color, it was almost indistinguishable from the cool magical girls shown on television.

I briefly wondered if this was all an illusion brought on by hay fever, but my childish nature overcame the sense of distortion from the ordinary, and I reached out to touch the outline of the crystal first. Shiina told me that it was a hecatolite, the proof of her identity as a magical girl, and it would soon become a little secret shared only by the two of us.

"Wow, that's great! I want to be a magical girl too…"

At the end of the memory fragments, I kept touching that hecatolite, leaning against the railing on the roof with Shiina, waiting for the sun to completely set on the horizon. The cherished friend and the desired screen image overlapped, and the joy of her confiding her true identity to me had completely evaporated my rationality, leaving only a touch of envy and excitement to repeat the same sigh.

Shiina, on the other hand, just gently stroked the tip of my hair, hiding her expression in the shadow against the light, saying nothing at all.

KurumiRyn 11/02/21 (Tue) 20:11:59 #72810516

For a long time after that day, I thought of myself as Shiina's partner, or rather, Magical Girl Hecatolite's partner. All I had to do was cover her whereabouts when she went missing after receiving messages on her smartphone or notes in her shoe closet: raise my hand in class to signal that I wasn't feeling well and needed her to help me to the infirmary, or stand in for Shiina to deliver a note to the convenience store where she often worked after school, and even help out when they were understaffed to earn some meager pocket money.

Basically, this was just to satisfy my vanity of wanting to leave my mark on the adventurous story of fighting dark forces with Magical Girl Hecatolite. After all, Shiina never allowed me to set foot in her self-proclaimed battle zone, and she was particularly firm on that point. Fortunately, Shiina would sometimes reward me with spoils of war - such as glittering crystals, weird toys only seen on TV shows, sweet cookies with chocolate cores, and other items that were exchanged for Yukichi2 before I even saw them, thus becoming tickets for me and Shiina to sneak away from our classmates to go downtown after school.

One of my few interests at that time was to sketch the imaginary appearance of monsters in a sketchbook based on the loot Shiina brought back - I was often amused by the image of a big-headed dog fighting with a cotton candy-flavored ice cream cone, but I never thought to ask Shiina what kind of monsters would carry ice cream cones for her.

But I noticed some slight changes in life - Shiina's wide collar was tightly fastened every day; some girls in the class were gradually radiating hostility toward me; Shiina was occasionally found in the teacher's office, the school's rooftop that was once our secret base was locked; there were several empty boxes of bandages and pills in Shiina's desk; I could find buttons that Shiina had dropped in secluded areas of the school building during gym class; when I entered the women's restroom designated for the post-victory meeting, a faint sobbing sound was coming from the innermost stall.

I couldn't articulate my bewildered concern because Magical Girl Hecatolite, draped in a white veil and glowing with pure light, had already pushed open the stall door, placed her right hand behind her back, and revealed Shiina's familiar bright smile.

KurumiRyn 11/02/21 (Tue) 21:35:13 #72810517

But whether it was the worries of adolescence or the comfort of that smile, both were quickly pushed to the back of my mind by two red-marked tests. Shiina and I did not excel academically, and the cost of diverting our energy to maintain our identities as magical girls naturally made our already unstable grades even worse.

After I bowed my head and put the test papers in my bag to take home, I undoubtedly faced my parents' uncontrollable anger. I couldn't bring myself to reveal the secret I had agreed with Shiina to get out of this predicament. It seemed that the only solution was to return to my studies. But before that, I wanted to see her one more time.

On the next free day, I knocked on Shiina's door.

It was the first time I visited Shiina's house. The door of the one-family house with cracked walls was not locked. With a sharp creaking sound that followed the knock of my knuckles, a thin gap about the width of a thumb appeared. Dust from the wall fell onto an overturned can blocking the door, and a few startled insects escaped from the can's mouth. There seemed to be no reaction inside the house to the fact that a stranger had knocked at the door, except for a faint, heavy snoring coming from deep inside, as if I had entered a cave inhabited by a beast.

I didn't dare enter. I quietly kicked the empty can inside and then closed the door with a feeling of trepidation. Maybe Shiina wasn't home - I comforted myself. I turned around, ready to go home. But as I walked through the alley of Third Street, my gaze was unexpectedly drawn to something that caught my eye.

As I looked down the street, evil black waves, like mud, swirled inside, hitting against the walls with a muffled sound. At the center of the waves, the pure white hecatolite appeared intermittently, swaying faintly with the waves and emitting a faint lament, as if the faint glow would be extinguished in the next moment, along with life itself. My heart suddenly raced, causing my vision to gradually blur. A dull pain crept into my mind, and what was only a few steps away seemed to stretch infinitely into an unreachable abyss. But in the end, all the fear, hesitation, struggle, and pain merged into the simplest instinct -

-I wanted to protect Shiina.

I set down my backpack at the entrance to the street, which contained a lunch box my mother had prepared for me to share with Shiina. Trying to control my trembling legs, I took a deep breath, grabbed a piece of scrap wood that could serve as a makeshift weapon, and averted my eyes from the menacing black waves that seemed like a nightmare turned real. With a muffled scream, I charged forward.

But soon, as my small shoes stumbled on the gravel, the cold touch of the ground and the rolling pain reached my senses. The piece of wood in my hand was gone. The dull thud of the knell stopped abruptly, replaced by indistinct shadows that crowded my tear-stained vision and obscured the sunny midday sky. I felt the mud swirling around me, and in my empty mind, I only hoped that it would lose interest in Shiina and allow her to escape.

The black mud swirled around me, forming grotesque shapes of monsters exhaling hot breath. One of them leaned towards me, assessing my worthiness as prey, its wet tongue slithering over my neck, emitting a nauseating stench. The rest of the mud swarmed around me like spectators to a macabre spectacle. I wanted to scream, but the tight grip on my neck stifled any sound. Even breathing became an extremely difficult task. The scene before my eyes gradually distorted due to the illusion and lack of oxygen. The monster looming over me shook, shedding its twisted form to reveal vivid animal patterns. Drool dripped down as it moved to bite into my body.

And in the next moment, warm liquid splashed and filled my field of vision.

The shadow above me twitched abnormally, and at one point a huge gaping maw appeared in front of me, emitting a disturbing gurgling sound. The stranglehold around my neck gradually loosened and was replaced by the weight of something falling weakly on my body, like a freshly caught fish from the market, jumping intermittently and then sinking into a cold silence amidst my rapid breaths.

The tide around me receded into the shadows on either side of the street amid the chaos. Through the distorted silhouette in front of me, Shiina stood behind it, almost naked. She picked up the piece of wood, now broken in the middle and covered with many fine, sharp spikes, and smashed it down on the creature lying on top of me. Once, twice, three times. In a daze, I could see Shiina trembling, her torn white veil fluttering with the movement, revealing her reddish-brown back and the pale pink textures and scars underneath, a few banknotes fallen from some unknown place crushed beneath her feet. The hecatolite on her chest blossomed with a bright red light in my liquid-soaked vision, then slipped from the grip of her skin and fell to the ground, leaving a terrifying dark void.

As my consciousness sank into darkness along with my thoughts, the gasping Shiina dropped the wood, laboriously ripped open the now unrecognizable creature on top of me, hesitated for a moment, then hugged me and whispered softly in my ear. I couldn't understand what she was saying, but a glimmer of hope remained in my heart. Maybe this was just a nightmare, and next Monday I would still be seeing my favorite Shiina in class, teasing her about her bizarre ideas, enjoying her smile, sharing the cold yet warm moonlight with her, and most importantly, finding a way to help her become a truly admirable magical girl.

KurumiRyn 11/02/21 (Tue) 22:01:44 #72810518

I can't remember exactly what happened in the month after I returned to school from my recovery. I only vaguely remember acting like a crazy person, loudly asking everyone who might know where Shiina had gone and why her desk suddenly became an empty space as if it were brand new.

The teachers all gave the same explanation, that Shiina Shouko had moved to another place. But they were silent about why she had been found in the teacher's office from time to time before. Most of the girls in the class would only gossip about unfounded rumors, such as the shameless Shiina finally being expelled for seducing adults, or becoming the next prey of a serial killer targeting female students, as reported in the news. As a result, I slapped one of them hard and froze the gradually improving interpersonal relationships in the school back to zero. I even mustered up the courage to sneak into Shiina's house in the middle of the night, but all I could see behind the door was yellow and black tape and cloth-covered furniture. Where the TV should have been in front of the couch in the living room, there was a human-shaped outline drawn with white lines on the floor. There were no other signs of life.

After that, I would occasionally find excuses to come home late on purpose and sit in Shiina's former seat in the empty classroom, looking at the distant moon hanging high, hoping that she would miraculously appear on the other side of the window, just like in the scenes described in the manga books. But even on the day I had to say goodbye to this familiar school building in order to advance to the next level of education, my wishes seemed to dissolve along with the truth about magical girls in the reflection of the full moon, receiving no answer.

KurumiRyn 11/02/21 (Tue) 22:17:38 #72810519

I used to think that as time passed, both Shiina Shouko and Magical Girl Hecatolite would fade away like other things that happened during the same period, stripped of their colors by time and mixed into a featureless sticky gelatin. Even if I wanted to remember something, it would just be like squeezing a muddy slice of "childhood" out of it, gradually corrected by the brain into a monotonous symbol, and thus disappearing from memory.

Until a few days ago, when I was dragged to a seemingly impromptu party by a senior member of the company.

After several large glasses of draft beer in a row, the slightly tipsy alcoholics at the table naturally began to break the bonds of social norms. There was a heavily made-up woman in a low-cut blouse and dress who, after getting drunk, simply tore open her collar, revealing her lacy lingerie and hastily smeared tattoo scars on her collarbone, and incoherently bragged to others about her "exploits" as a member of a delinquent student group in high school - I had intended to get through this group of drunks with squid tentacles, but soon even the last trace of appetite disappeared.

As if a silent taunt echoed in my ears, the words and names she spat out were strangely familiar, perhaps accompanied by deliberately embellished memories in the subconscious. An inexplicable feeling of fear bursting from the bottom of my heart made me want to find a reason to temporarily leave, but I was firmly grabbed by the already drunk senior, who forcibly pushed me back into my seat and poured a few mouthfuls of shochu.

The burning sensation of alcohol rushed to my forehead, and I couldn't remember what happened after enduring these fragmented but somewhat coherent stories like torture. I only remember stumbling back to the apartment with a swaying gait, even struggling to get the key in the lock. The next fragment was falling awkwardly out of the overflowing bathtub, looking up past the damp, hanging bangs, seeing myself covered in mist in the bathroom mirror, and feeling - at some point, or perhaps as an illusion - an irregular protrusion on my chest, the skin above lifting slightly, trembling fingertips brushing the surface, feeling icy cold and hard.

Like a once dazzling hecatolite.

On second thought, I may not have the qualifications to be a magical girl. I have no alien beings to make contracts with, no decisive battle outfits, no ability to unleash colorful magic, no wands, no cards, no cannons, and no flaming bows or arrows or guns to deal with the monsters lurking in the dark shadows, and I haven't even discovered the darkness that Shiina Shouko encountered nearby. I just grew up quietly into a mediocre and weak adult.

But sometimes a few sleeping pills mixed into the draft beer, a well-sharpened bone cleaver, and a claw hammer tied to the right hand with duct tape can belatedly fulfill anyone's wishes. Right now, I truly believe that from the bottom of my heart.

Footnotes

1. Translator's Note: Japanese slang for pupils who are not members of any club.

2. Translator's Note: Japanese slang for 10,000-yen banknotes, on which Fukuzawa Yukichi appears.