Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Forty Nine - Denka [電荷]

It was just a sick, sad joke.

The contents of tattered memories and broken hearts was a heavy burden, no matter how much Amaya appreciated their delivery by unexpected hands.

Maybe it hurt less that it had been Heinrich who had brought the notebooks and final words. Maybe it was the best circumstances for such a thing. But that didn't mean it didn't feel like someone had jammed a shiv between her ribs to gouge into her heart.

Amaya didn't quite remember how she had arrived back home, nor did she remember if she had cooked anything for her siblings dinner or just let them order takeout. She certainly didn't know if she had eaten.

All she knew was that she'd been locked up in her room all alone, with her gaze retracing Genivierre's letter of final words.

She didn't dare open the other envelope that outlined what Genivierre's inheritance actually entailed, or the other two that she couldn't comprehend their reasonings for at that second. The stack of old, tattered notebooks lay tauntingly across the covers of her bed, as if mocking her with the information she knew they held. One in particular was painfully familiar to Amaya, and as soon as she had realized exactly which notebook she had unwittingly lifted from the bag Heinrich gave her, she had practically thrown the faded teal book across the room as if it had tried to bite her.

Maybe some other time when the wounds were still so fresh in her mind, she would read it.

But not now.

She had dared to at least stare down at the covers of the remaining notebooks, dwelling over the faint scores of years marking the colour-coded covers and connecting them to years she could recall. At least, a good third of them, in any case. The newer of the books were blank spaces in her mind.

A pale yellow notebook of the least wear stood out clearly to Amaya in the end, and she hesitantly reached out towards it, if only because she had once recalled that she needed to know what exactly some of the problems her newest sibling might be living with.

The cover felt unpleasant beneath her fingers as her emotions twisted like that shiv was still there between her ribs. Her fingers grazed the elegant and decoratively looped writing that marked the contents of the book.

Storms Project, Subject Forty Eight

Samuel Berchmanns-Katsuragi

Child of Subject Forty-One, Elanore Berchmanns

Overview of the Child prior to the mother immersion

My first meeting with Samuel Berchmanns has yet again brought me to despise the circumstances for meeting such a young innocent. Like most of the Subject Children following the Mass Disposal of the Control Children are of Toji's own blood, and this child is no different. I am informed by Elanore's statement upon her immersion to the project that Samuel has never met his father in spite of being biologically related. And for that, I feel it's a blessing in disguise. I pray that he will never join the dots.

Unlike most Project Mothers, Elanore had been inducted with more understanding than most, which is quite unlike Toji's usual actions to procure new Mothers. I have been informed that Elanore agreed to provide a child under the belief that, while her own condition held next to no chance of a cure, experimentation upon her would bear the groundwork that would "cure" her child should she have one, and she promptly agreed.

It was further explained that the child were to be of Toji's own blood, as the cures he has worked on to date worked most proficiently within his own gene pool. I am astounded that such an explanation was enough to win Elanore over, just as I am astounded that on both parent's side, Samuel's existence was brought to life purely with this experimentation in mind.