Chapter 1: 01

I hadn't ever disobeyed an order in my life. That was something I took pride in. Parents, teachers, and other scummy adults which would be easily misinterpreted as "Authority figures" are all people I looked up to and always obeyed without fail. My goodie-two-shoes behavior was routine for me, as I knew very well where the line between good and bad was drawn, and I also knew where I stood along it, which was right in the middle and leaning toward the good maybe a little. Taking a neutral stance to almost every extent, I never did anything to stand out, nor did I ever disobey what an authority figure told me to do. That was how I was raised from an extremely early age. I was raised to remain neutral in all situations unless told otherwise by an adult. This is the cookie cutter good child mentality all parents want their children to grow up with, however, because of my upbringing, there were many times I should have acted and did not. As a result, I lost many things and people I cared about. I had been through many devastating experiences, but I was able to move forward by convincing myself that remaining neutral was the courteous, polite, and just thing to do. Also unfortunate was that my "way of life", if you could call it that, got me involved with plenty of people I shouldn't have ever known. Delinquents, is what you would call them. Delinquents, and the deplorable adults that made their children behave in such atrocious manners. I was swiftly thrown into a world that nobody, especially of my age at the time, should have been involved with. Even through the suffering, anguish, mistreatment, deceit, betrayal, and losing her, I remained impartial and obedient to those in power. I shouldn't have been in the gray area at those times, but I hadn't yet been put through enough to pull me over the line. Regardless of my many mistakes and failure to act, I survived, but despite not ever wavering in my typical response to an uncomfortable situation, I gained a new outlook on life. I realized that life is an incredibly unfair game that all of the unfortunate participants were forced to play. People must play with the random hand they're dealt, to make it even worse. Those who were dealt a silver spoon in their mouth had the privilege of walking over those who were less fortunate, and using them as little pawns to play their own games with. People who aren't so lucky are cursed with bending to the will of those above them, and the little freedom they trick themselves into thinking they have is just a farce in every way. Poor souls who weren't born rich or well connected could work their way up from their positions, but that process involves lots of manipulation, betrayal, abuse, and violence, which causes the lucky few who get to ascend from the bottom to become corrupt and lost their values on the way up. Unfortunately, and I'm using that word very liberally because these things truly are unfortunate, but it's because the journey to the top is so lined with thorns that very few get to the top without abandoning at least a shred of their humanity. There are also those who lose just as much of their humanity, or perhaps even more just by staying right where they are in the world, but while those who can become corrupt without tasting any power can be quite a plague, and pose a unique threat, they don't matter. Power rules, as they say. Those with it live nice, and those without it don't. All of this, of course, is a gross summarization of and assumption about everybody in every position in society ever, but in a lot of cases, I'm not too far off the mark, am I? Using personal experience, I speak based on what I've seen and what I believe. Life of course is an unfair game in which everyone loses, as death spares no one. A bit too grim of an outlook on life for me personally, but nihilism and other such ways of thought are still pretty popular these days, right? I don't think your views on life should be swayed by what's trendy, but anyway. I prefer to think that life is a mountain with no peak, and is an uphill climb in every direction. All your effort in the end amounts to nothing. That's why we all lose. I still never changed how I acted, despite having learned all this, and I survived. I survived, without changing my actions or beliefs in the slightest, up until the beginning point of this story. There I sat, in a cafe in Shinjuku, doing some work on my laptop. I was obviously not aware at the time that some people from another world had their own plans to put me to use.