Even though she had barely slept, and it was almost time for sunrise, Emika started investigating the phone right away. She couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of wonder going through the device of a complete stranger. Immediately, she had to wade through a sea of notifications, with a bunch of new messages from something called “Family Chat,” as well as 3 messages from someone labelled “Love,” which Emika could only imagine being his spouse.

She found out that he had a wife and a daughter, was living on the other side of town and still had three shifts to Observe Hasegawa Emika scheduled in his calendar, which she promptly deleted.

After learning that his name was Lester, she wrote a message to his wife, saying: “Don’t worry, Lester is fine, should be home soon.”

Unable to quell her curiosity, Emika started scrolling up in the chat log. It was mostly comprised of short messages related to everyday life. That is, until she intruded upon a string of texts and pictures that were truly only intended to be shared between lovers. As if she had touched a hot baked potato, she immediately exited the chat log on reflex. This is why you don’t invade other people’s privacy, she thought, and she meant it as an admonition to both herself and Lester.

To distract herself from what she had just seen, she opened the internet browser. To her surprise, it wasn’t one of the usual sites that popped up, but something called ‘Barnacle’, which Emika soon realised to be a search engine for magical topics. Not like it turned up a lot of results on her first few attempts to use it, though; it seemed incredibly niche.

She noticed that there was a link to a page with usage instructions, but they were quite long and Emika’s tired mind was unable to even properly parse the introduction. She’d have to go through this at some point — it seemed much too interesting a prospect to pass up on, but she’d bother with it another day.

Going through the pictures on Lester’s phone, she could see a multitude of videos and photos of herself — pictures taken through windows, pictures from when she had gone outside to burn bodies, as well as pictures of her house, and work documents. There were probably hundreds of them.

In addition, there were many pictures of his family, who didn’t seem to have the same ageing condition as he had. His daughter was apparently either in her late teens or early twenties, and had the air of a college student around her. Interestingly enough, even though the pictures were pictures and not videos, the effect of him constantly perishing remained. Small lines of sand kept pouring out of the phone’s screen whenever he was on display, together with small puffs of dust that filled the air every now and then as the body parts vanished into nothingness.

Emika got distracted by this phenomenon for way too long, until finally snapping out of it like from a trance. This person was truly marvellous.

At last, she took a look at Lester’s work notes and reopened the list that he had shown her earlier. It took her quite a while to understand what she was seeing; the data was obviously only meant for him, and not written with necessary explanations or insights to be understood by another person. That said, he seemed pretty organised, and thus making sense of it didn’t seem like an all-impossible task.

Apparently, his modus operandi was to first gather reports of weird phenomena, and then to go there to check in person whether they had to do with that Revenant. There weren’t that many, and some of them had occurred pretty far away, to the point where Emika couldn’t easily reach them in her current state. The data consisted of a time and a place, as well as some additional notes to the occurrence, and an assigned danger level. Some of these sightings had already been visited by Lester and contained notes like Nothing verifiable or just a pixie.

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Emika checked the locations he hadn’t visited yet and found the one that was closest to her. It was denoted with a danger level of A to S.

It was unclear to her whether the Levels A to S were high or low. She couldn’t possibly imagine dangerous beings existing in her vicinity, so she figured A must be the lowest, and if it went up to Z, then S was… Being too lazy to count up the alphabet, she just assumed it must have been somewhere in the middle.

Meeting one of these wasn’t out of the question, was it? Emika wondered what kind of amazing creatures were lingering out there… She almost forgot that she was supposed to investigate them because they might be related to her own affliction, and not just because it seemed exciting.

She put the phone on the night desk and laid down on her bed.

This all was really happening, huh? This was all real.

Now that she finally took the time to go over her situation in quiet, an unwavering, dull worry started to seep into her mind. If what Lester had told her — and for that matter, what he had written in his notes on his phone about her — was to be believed, then she was indeed suffering from a deadly curse that was slowly spreading through her body, killing her in the process.

She looked at her growth. It was truly unrelenting. It had already grown to twice its size compared to when she had last looked at it… and that was despite having cut it off not so long ago. So was it her fate to turn into a bonsai tree? How fitting…

In fact, too fitting… She couldn’t help but feel like it wasn’t a coincidence. Whatever cursed her must have had to do with the fact that she was a bonsai gardener. For now, she didn’t know where to take that lead, but it seemed notable, so she made sure to edge it into an appropriate space in her mental notes of her entire situation.

When she noticed the time, Emika turned on the radio and put on a random news station, in hopes that it would eventually reveal if there had been a development… She figured, the way her friends had died, it would make the news. But ever since it had happened, there’d been nothing. No news whatsoever that could give her a hint.

It was as if the entire world was just living on in peace, and she was the only one who couldn’t. Just thinking about all this made her feel sick to her stomach again. Eva’s death flashed back before her. She pressed her hands against her eyes before she’d start crying.

Her situation really sucked. Someone — Lester’s client, of whom she’d found no traces on her phone so far — was definitely aware of her curse, and was aware of what she had done. She briefly thought about leaving her home, but… she had nowhere to go. She was stuck.

Before going to sleep, she changed the SIM card in Lester’s phone to her own, and also made a second profile on it where she could log in to her email account and her social media. She wouldn’t take care of all the issues that had piled up while she was offline now, but she wanted to at least take a cursory look.

After logging in, she was immediately greeted by a flood of mails, most of which were spam. As she scrolled through, though, she found a peculiar one:

Melisande from MysteryLense has sent you a message.

MysteryLense… Why did that name ring a bell to Emika? She needed a second to remember. On the day of the incident, after her growth had first appeared, she had made an account on a random internet forum about supernatural phenomena… That had been a frustrating dead end.

Melisande, on the other hand, was definitely not a name Emika had ever heard before, so perhaps it was some user from that network. But why would anyone send her a message when she had only ever logged in once? … And what could they have written?