Chapter 2: Unexpected Guest
It was one of those days where you're tempted to remind yourself that at least it isn't raining but don't out of fear that karmic justice will cause an ironic downpour just to teach you a lesson. Yumeji didn't bring an umbrella with him today so he could hardly afford to take that risk. But he wanted to. Any sort of change would work for him, so long as it broke up the current trend of his day. This long, annoying day which seemed to never end.
Why does a communications major have to take calculus anyways, he wondered as he plodded down the road. If you want to spend your life in a certain field then it just seems cruel to be forced to waste your time learning about something that you're never going to need to know. Then again, he thought, he wasn't exactly sure that he'd want to spend the rest of his life in communications. It seemed like a versatile degree path so he chose it. It made life easier, being a comm major. When his parents asked him what his plans were, he could say he's looking at a field in communications. When he had to find friends at school he could always just mingle with his fellow comm students. It was easy to pick classes, just follow the communications degree path. Everything was nice and simple, but in reality Yumeji didn't have a clue what he wanted to do with his life. He was like a piece of driftwood floating along in the placid river known as college, going wherever the current took him. Soon he'd be dumped out into the ocean that is adulthood, but there was no reason to look that far ahead as far as he was concerned. Life would work itself out.
Yumeji wasn't a spiritual person. He didn't much believe in superstitions, either. He didn't believe in ghosts or spirits or ghouls or Gods. He wasn't sure what he did believe, of course, but he was fairly certain that the supernatural belonged in manga and anime and had no place in the real world. He was about to be introduced to an alternate way of looking at the world, though, as he finally arrived back at his low-rent two story apartment building. He made his way up the exterior stairs, nearly tripping on the final step as he always did for some reason. His was the unit furthest from the stairway, unit 6 of 6. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. He tossed his backpack on the folding-chair-turned-table that he kept near the front door, removed his shoes, and sauntered over to the fridge to grab a soda. He downed it pretty quickly, a bad habit of his on exhausting days. That's when he noticed it for the first time, the thing that would change his life forever, sitting on his futon.
"Why's there a doll on my bed?" he asked nobody in particular as his brain struggled to catch up.