Angel Beats! A Step Closer

Act III Chapter 8: Foregoing

"Every thought you've ever had, Otonashi-san, is your own personal interpretation. There are plenty of times where we see eye to eye but those thoughts are ours alone. People always ask what normal is. It's just based on how they interpret what's considered normal to them."

"You asked if people don't understand the concept of normality, right?"

"Of course, they do."

Eri Shiina

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What Shiina preserved from her existence as a child was her serenity. Completely undisturbed, only beginning to understand the world around her. Human instinct ran her life, guided by two mysterious figures that sought a bond with her and treating her with the utmost love and compassion. She never knew why but happily accepted it without a second thought. Using those mysterious figures she saw whenever her eyes opened from early morning, she was told by them every day to wake up early, go to school, work, eat, and sleep. She grew older, finding out how to address both of them: mother and father.

Following the lifestyle of a growing baby, she wanders around her village from time to time, gathering every piece of information that embraced her retinas and eardrums. After that, she returns home to repeat the same process. She pulled her weight alongside her parents. Farming, cutting, braiding. Whatever was asked of her, she learned and attempted to master. She lacked the fondness of using knives and handheld tools, preferring to use her hands. Having never been experienced with knives and other tools, she only saw them as another thing to handle when she could easily rip something apart. The dexterity and already-developed calluses only made tasks easier to complete. One day an injury to her hand came due to her trying to play with a knife, cutting through the callus and causing bleeding.

Her parents ogled her with curious looks upon discovering the injury, only to be completely ignored by their child's rampant thoughts. She made a revelation, and she will find every use for it. She happily took over any tasks that required a knife to find different techniques to cut effectively. She then discovered the sharpness of knives and how they factored when cutting things, so she learned to maintain them.

It wasn't too long before her thirst to discover something new led her astray.

"Eri! Why did you cut yourself!? How could you do something so reckless!?" Her mother screamed at her, desperate to find the answer as she held onto Shiina's arm, attempting to stop the bleeding. Shiina had cut herself; the extents of the injury were unknown but can be assumed to be large as blood spilled from the pieces of cloth her mother put on top. He attempted to wrap a long piece of cloth around the kid's arm with the father beside her mother.

"I sharpened it. I wanted to see how deep it could go," she replied weakly. A doctor ran into the Shiina household, panting heavily as he began to work alongside her parents, giving them orders as Shiina's senses began to dull.

Shiina survived, remaining in the care of people who rotated throughout the weeks. The rotations consisted of various people, typically her neighbors and parents, while the doctor maintained a set visitation schedule. The weeks passed as the road to recovery for young Shiina was slow.

For poor Shiina, technology wasn't advanced. Wars were fought with bows, arrows, and swords. Medicine was no exception. The only thing that kept her from succumbing to the threats of infection was that cleanliness was a concept that applied to their daily lives. However, cleanliness to them only paled in comparison to the modern world. Measures like isolation and covering up the entire body of an individual were learned at a great cost, resulting in many others' deaths before them. Thanks to their deaths, those in the future would have a better chance of surviving. It was human instinct, after all.