This Human Animal

In the week after, Mia notified the rest of Urasaria & Aimee of their deaths (the latter of whom would notify their families), and had given herself & Serena the rest of the week off. Serena took this opportunity to catch up on her Steam backlog of games and was interrupted by Mia knocking at her door. She answered it.

"Aimee should be here in fifteen minutes. I just got off the phone with her."

Serena nodded. "Did she already tell their parents?"

"She did, and... she also told me someone reported us for attacking another student." Mia smiled a little, then looked down at Serena. "…Serena, can you come sit with me in the living room until she's here?"

"Sure. Um, just gimme a minute to finish up."

Mia nodded and walked. As Serena went back to her room and was alone, she thought of Kirihara, and an image entered her mind. There was a popular anime she watched called JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It was based on a Japanese manga that had run since the mid 80s, and featured superpowers gained through different methods of breathing called Hamon. (The creator once considered writing a new power named Stands in to the series, but he was advised they would be too similar to Revenants to sell well.)

Still, the power that came to Serena's mind was *King Crimson Epitaph*, the name itself a reference to the song by the 70s English band. It allowed the breather to see 10 seconds in to the future, and Serena felt that if she had used this power while looking at Kirihara's expression against that headboard, she would have been able to completely plot the strait of life Kirihara let herself be washed down. After Serena & Mia had left, Kirihara would travel the rest of the way to the delivery point and threaten the assigner in to verifying the contract as completed. He would oblige, and as she left, she would become angered by something insignificant about him, as small as that one of his teeth sat slightly crooked or that his name shared a first letter with Serena's.

Destiny exerts itself in those who immediately give all emotions their due, so she would oblige it, yet she was not the type to abuse animals. Lesser creatures did nothing for her. So, she murdered a civilian. She never stopped anywhere on her way back to Urasaria, even as this meant she was ignoring every distress signal nearby and diminishing her own chances at presidency. This pettiness was why she would later lose to Matoi on April 30th, then afterwards bitch at her about how unfair the results were and how Matoi must have cheated.

Then, Serena knew, she would try to punch Matoi and end up with a burnt dot where her neck used to be. Her head would roll down her body, fall between her legs, then tumble next to a storm drain Satsuki Kiryuin sneered and kicked it in to. Serena was so fucking sure of this that a smile crested the horizon of her cheeks as she imagined -- *watched* this unfold.

She then burped, saw that her bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red soda was running low, and refilled it with Blackburn as she walked out of her room.

There are some minds only able to catch such insights via what drops from the firmament of others. To reproduce a line Serena earlier said of Kirihara: "You're an asshole to everyone and then cry about how nobody likes you." This may sound familiar, as Mia had said of Kirihara: "She shits on anyone in a weaker position than her and cries about how everyone persecutes her."

Notice the difference: the former implies that Kirihara is an oblivious prick, while the latter cores more deeply in to that she despises weakness yet has a sense of neediness. This shall not be the last time Mia reads a human's character like one reads the Mississippi River, but notice how Mia is more experienced, more eloquent, even as her & Serena are the same age. This is because some minds more accurately refine the bounty the cosmos gives them: sometimes in to words like these. It is not a measure of intelligence, exactly, moreso a measure of communication.

If you have ever seen a colony of bacteria form a slimy, macroscopic biofilm that rests on a branch or food, then you may already know that this is how many bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. Sometimes these communities become so entangled that scientists cannot separate one individual from another, but as they transfer their genes between each other, there is eventually one who mutates to resist penicillin and passes it to all others, even when some cannot accept it or die before they do.

It is the same with humanity and great minds. Mia is no Einstein or Darwin, but her mentorship of Serena and setting an intelligent example for her allowed Serena the desire to make such insights as the ones above, even if she near-instanteously went back to, well, Serena, at the end of it. If one does not believe that, then return to the passage where Serena envied Mia for being able to devote her attention to novels, and the candle whose light billows past an eastern door.

[END OF ARC: BEST FRIENDS]