You’re asking for the impossible again.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: February 16, 2024

Character: Kail Káva
Race: Human
Age: 33
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

---

I wish they’d get it through their heads that even if they rush the body right onto my table, I’m still going to do everything by the rules. I don’t care if you think you can pay for the body to be processed faster and then cut open with no proper results given whatsoever. I’ve been in trouble with the law far too often back in the States—by no fault of mine from the get-go—that I refuse to do anything unlawful.

This includes fake autopsies or autopsies to which I falsify the reports. You can’t pay me off, try as you want, that’s just not going to work and if I catch anyone else in my team accepting a bribe of any sort to falsify a report, they’re not going to be happy about how things end up for them. I don’t care if that makes me seem like I’m a mighty brown-noser just now, but I’m not. I like keeping in line with the law and having had someone in my life who so happened to have been a cop, I just know better too.

It’s bad enough that the whole gang thing hasn’t been fully dealt with yet and it’s been a few years at this point. Not that I expected them to eradicate the whole gang thing altogether, but I had expected some progress. It’s been the opposite. We now see these idiots roaming ever closer to the station, as though they’re not unafraid of the cops or, and this one worries me somewhat, as though they might have bought the cops, if you would.

Several cops have been found to have been paid off by members of gangs recently, their corruption clear as day and they were removed from their jobs and left with an ugly mark on their lives and in their files that will make it impossible for them to ever work in law enforcement ever again. I’m well aware that this hasn’t stopped some of them. Some have possibly even created their own security companies and are offering their services but, at that point, it’s well beyond anything I might have a care in the world for.

One of the things I’m not quite so lucky as to be able to just not care about is having to deal with my intern. He’s paid. To make that one thing clear to anyone who might be getting ready to rush through the morgue doors just to tell me about how I’m abusing my power by not paying my intern. He’s being paid.

It’s a paid internship.

Get off your high horses.

He likes to think himself my assistant but he’s not. He hasn’t progressed far enough in his studies to be my assistant and I wouldn’t want his grubby hands anywhere near my work station even if he was. This is the kid—he’s a kid to me, I think he’s twenty-one—who complains and bitches when I ask him to ensure that all of the instruments have been sterilized. He moans and whines that I’m asking for the impossible. Ivan, I swear, I’m not asking for the impossible. I’m asking you to gather up all of the tools I’ve used up in this autopsy, to bring them to the machine, drop them on the stray, and let the machine do its job.

It doesn’t seem like it should be all that complicated and it’s certainly not impossible.

Normally, I do all of this by myself because I work well by myself, but they found it necessary to saddle me with this intern. Mind you, he should be doing paperwork. He’s an intern on an administrative level and he should be doing paperwork but the ass-kissing he does has to be real good because he’s in my morgue more often than not and he’s tried—unsuccessfully—to do an autopsy himself.

Kid would cut his own arm off with my tools before even being able to make his first incision on my corpse. No, thank you. So, I make him gather up the used tools—which gross him out and that makes me happy—so they can be sanitized. I get him to wash the table and sanitize that too once I’m done. He complains about it every second, but he does do it in the long run. He knows better. If he refuses to do the tasks I ask of him, he knows I’ll punt him back up to his desk.

Mind you, I’ll be happy when he leaves. I’ll be able to go back to doing my own job without hearing him breathing way too close behind my back. Have I kicked him accidentally—not—when I move around. I’ve stepped on his feet, I’ve elbowed him. None of it done maliciously, if you ask me. He’s in my way. I could walk and move with less ample motions, but he needs to learn to respect my effing personal space.

So no, I’m not a tiny bit unhappy about the fact that he’s likely got bruises in place because he can’t mind my personal space. He’ll just have to learn. Because I’ve told him to back off and he won’t. So, he’ll learn in a different way. That’s all.

Final Word Count: 881

I have a feeling that whenever I say not to do something, you take it as a personal challenge.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: January 29, 2024

Character: Kaleb Willems
Race: Human
Age: 42
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

---

There are kittens in the house. I don’t know who brought them in. I don’t want to know who brought them in, either. I’m not looking to place the blame on anyone or point any fingers. There are kittens in the house, the necessary items to take care of these kittens have been bought and placed and momma cat has been nowhere to be found after that first day.

All in all, I honestly think that it was a general decision to bring them inside. Their mother had been coming and going around the neighbourhood for a while, but she ended up giving birth in one of our bushes. It was tightly sheltered against the house, there were just about no drafts to be felt and the kittens looked to be in mostly good shape when we first spotted them.

Except, you know. Near-end of fall, it was fairly cold. I recall that someone set things up to keep them warm until their mother came back but she didn’t. So, they were brought into the house. From that moment onward, there was plenty of rushing about being done. Getting them set comfortably and even warmer, going to the store to get the formula, milk, and whatever else these still-young kittens would need. Their eyes were just barely open, so they were very, very young.

It only took a few hours before everything had been bought and brought inside and without really needing to say it out loud, we all sort of started taking turns.

They’ve grown since and they’re a handful most of the time. I see that as a good thing, it means that they’re healthy—or so the vets say—and they’re playful. They tend to all end up sleeping in a pile most of the time and it’s fairly cute.

I’ve lost count of how often one of us has sighed at their antics, though; an amused sort of sound more than anything else. How often I’ve thought to myself that I felt as though if I were to tell these little bundles of energy that there was something they shouldn’t do—somehow make their way up to the top of the fridge, for one—they would see it as a personal challenge to do just that.

Now, I know that these cats might eventually understand a few words that we might teach them—I can see the way some of us have already gotten attached to them, they’re not going anywhere—but I don’t know that they have the cognitive ability to really formulate plans. Certainly, nothing to the point where I might have imagined them taking every reminder to not do particular things as personal challenges.

I can see children, teens, and even other adults have that sort of behaviour, but I’m having a hard time imagining cats as being that way. I think we would never hear the end of it all. Can you imagine? Go on, tell your pet not to do that one thing that you know they love doing, and then watch in potential horror as they go out of their way to do exactly the opposite, and that, as often as they possibly can because why not.

My mind is a strange place, at times. The fact that these have brought a slight sort of chaos into our home hasn’t been easy for me, but I’ve done my best to adapt. My brothers know that my attention needs to be on a single subject matter at once, and this is one of the reasons why I haven’t really been the one to handle their feeding months back when we first got them.

Now that they’re older, I can handle things a little easier. Filling their food bowls is easy. Clearing out the litter box is easy. Checking on their water fountain, easy. Simple things that don’t require that my attention be on more than one thing at once. That works out well for me. Do I wish that I would have been able to participate in the feeding of them when we had first gotten them in? Yes and no. I know my own limits and I’ve watched my brothers handle the tasks just fine without my help. I did burp them now and again while it was still a necessity.

I went with Simo when he took them to the vet. Mostly because, try as he might, he never would have been able to handle carrying all of them himself. We had a single, large carrier that we’ve since changed into something more comfortable for them but that is for future visits.

If there is one thing that all of us have set our mind upon is that we’re going to keep them as indoor cats unless they absolutely make a show of wanting to go outside. We’ll check on things otherwise from there onward but, for now… they’re indoor cats and I guess that our family has gotten bigger.

Final Word Count: 828

If I weren’t so scared of you, I’d have pushed you off that high horse of yours ages ago.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: January 4, 2024

Character: Sasha Pajari
Race: Human
Age: 34
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

---

I wonder if it’s strange that I feel as though I know what it’s like to be a parent now? I mean, not in a deep sense of the word. I have watched the twins grow up in a way. I’ve seen them nearly daily from the time they were old enough to go to school, mostly just in the sense of watching them head to either their bus stops in the mornings or, a little later on in life in the afternoons, watching them walk on by to head to the community centre.

I’ve seen more of Yerik than I have seen Alena in the last two years. The twins used to be just so close, but they’ve drifted apart; it happened little by little but I’m fairly certain that the reason it did happen was Tusya’s presence at Yerik’s side. That and, well, the fact that Alena’s brain has turned to boys-boys-boys, and I’ve watched what was possibly the final fallout at the community centre not this summer, but the one before.

Yerik has always been a soft-spoken boy, a wonderful young man now, helped greatly by Tusya’s refusal to take any bullshit. Alena seemed to show no interest in Tusya’s present from the get-go, I can only assume she left it be because he wasn’t making any waves in hers and her brother’s life but oh, when the confession happened, so did the changes.

I was spending some time at the centre to help out in the way that I tend to do because it makes me feel useful when the couple walked in. Yerik’s parents seem to have opened up to the acceptance of their son, at least that I’ve heard about. He still doesn’t spend much time home that I’ve noticed but if he’s happy, he’s allowed to.

Alena came into the community centre not long after the pair did. For once in who knows how long, she was actually alone. Since her transfer back into her brother’s school, that girl discovered herself in a sexual way that makes me uncomfortable, and I’m not even related to her. I think I relate more to the poor boys she just strings along.

Anyway. She made a beeline right for her brother and Tusya and, well, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but hearing Yerik tell his sister that if he hadn’t so scared of her, he’d have pushed her off that high horse of hers ages ago was not it. He sounded so sure of himself, his voice was just so sharp, and I had to ask myself if it hadn’t been Tusya who’d said those words, but that kid has never been impressed by Alena in any way, shape or form. It was almost as though she didn’t even exist to him. She did exist in some way since she was his now-boyfriend’s twin, but that was it.

I did wait until she had stormed off—which didn’t take long—to check in on the boys. They didn’t really need me to, but confrontations like these do need to be checked up on just to ensure that all parties are okay. There have been others before that turned to blows, so it’s just one of those things.

Yerik looked shaken and wouldn’t even look at me as I approached them. He was hiding away against Tusya’s shoulder and I mostly, quietly so, spoke to the latter who told me that for the last few weeks, Alena had tried—fruitlessly—to somehow tempt Tusya into her bed. If Yerik’s reaction hadn’t been so heartbreaking just then, I think I would have laughed at the absurdity of it all.

By that point, I’d been well aware that Alena now seemed to think herself the greatest gift ever and that she could tempt anyone into her bed, but that she’d tried with Tusya at all is beyond absurd. For one, these two boys—young men at this point, really—have only had eyes for one another since they confessed their love, and, well, I’ve spoken to Tusya a few times and I know for a fact that he has no interest whatsoever in the other gender.

One way or another, Alena was out of luck, she was an idiot, and I have seen her even less since that day. It’s sad, in a way, but at the same time, it’s a good thing that Yerik has finally put his foot down as far as his sister is concerned. This is why I feel as though I might let myself believe that I know what it feels like to be a parent, in a way. I’m proud of Yerik and I know that these two are going to be together for a while yet.

Are they going to be together until the end of all time? I don’t know. But for now, they’re just wonderfully sweet together.

Final Word Count: 821

I wasn’t going to yell, but that was before I saw the giant dragon-shaped hole in my living room wall.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: January 3, 2024

Character: Kaede Mori
Race: Human
Age: 37
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

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I don’t feel drugged—I know how it feels, thank you. I don’t feel drunk—though I’ve only ever been once before and that was because the person supplying the drinks didn’t tell me they were alcoholic and by the taste alone I couldn’t tell. I don’t know how to explain what’s currently going on, other than I might just possibly be lucid dreaming. If that is the case, this would be a first. I have very few recollections of my dreams, let alone the possibility of being lucid during them.

I’ve had hallucinations while I was at the institute, it was just one of the things that I’ve had to deal with. I’m surprised I can function as well as I can now after everything that I’ve gone through. I suppose that since I refuse to honestly think about it and much prefer to focus on my life as it is now, instead of what my life had been before, it helps.

I’m in the living room of the big house. There are days when I still wonder just how it is we’ve managed to get this perfect house. It’s not in the absolutely best neighbourhood, but it has exactly the number of bedrooms we needed, it has a common space in the heart of it and it suits us well. It’s almost as though it was built for us, though I know it wasn’t.

There are times, though they’re rare, that I worry that, somehow, the institute had this house built for us to keep an eye on us for their research but then I remind myself that we were all released at different times over the course of years and it wouldn’t make sense for them to do that. I could be wrong, but I much prefer to not think about it. We’ve all considered moving to another house at times when that subject crops up, but finding another perfect place would be near impossible, it feels like.

The living room looks the way it has from the start—other than it has been decorated over the years and now there is more blue than anything else and a slight tree in a corner. None of us really do celebrate but the decorations are a nice, soft touch. There’s a huge hole in the living room wall and the more I look at it, the more my mind tries to supply that it’s dragon-shaped.

This is one of the first things that make me realize that I’m not awake. Dragons are not a thing—not of the size of whatever has made the hole in that living room. The other thing that makes me believe that this is very likely a dream and that I must be lucid is the fact that when I look outside of that hole, everything is green and warm. Summer-like. We’re in the dead of winter. Though not dead-dead since technically speaking the winter season itself only started a couple of weeks ago but that’s just semantics.

There’s no one else in the living room with me and I can’t even hear anything in the house at all. The house is never completely empty. I think it might have happened a handful of times over the years that I’ve been completely on my own in this very house but it’s so rare that I don’t even consider it a thing.

Even if I wanted to try and find a culprit for this hole in the living room wall, I wouldn’t be able to do that. The whole dream takes on an even less believable turn when my mind finally latches on that I shouldn’t even be able to see outside with a hole in the living room wall. This common area is more or less dead centre in the house, in a way. It’s a bit off to the side, but all the bedrooms have an outside wall. Everything else is inside.

If I’m lucid, by all means, I should be able to wake myself up from this dream but I’ve yet to find a way to manage. I don’t know why I’m having this dream; I don’t know why it’s been invaded by this potential dragon that has somehow moved the living room, so it sits along the outside wall of the house. I don’t really know anything and there is no one else in this deserted world to give me any answers.

Sitting down and not doing a single thing is not how I want to go at this, but I feel that if I start roaming, I’m going to end up going around in circles and what good does that do me? None. Then again, being stuck in this empty world, even if it’s just a dream, isn’t doing me any good either, though. I’ll wake up before long. I have to.

Final Word Count: 812

You bring light to my life, sometimes. Other times, I wish you’d stop waking me up so early.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: June 24, 2023

Character: Simo Lahti
Race: Human
Age: 31
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

---

My dating luck is still rotten, and I think I’ve just about given up on it. I’ll stick to one-night stands that, at times, lead to two or three but I think that three is about as often as I’ve been with a single guy before he either found something wrong with me or something about him bothered me enough that I just couldn’t be bothered to deal with him anymore.

I’m still a bit of a whore and I’m fine with that, honestly. I am who I am and my brothers—the men I live with, even though we’re not related by blood—accept me as I am. I never bring anyone home, it wouldn’t be fair. Our place is huge but that’s also because there’s a lot of us living there. We thought about just buying an apartment building of sorts but we all really like having a common living room and kitchen. I’m sure we could figure something out though if we really set our mind to it.

Anyway.

The latest addition to my long line of dating attempts was Valentin. He was gorgeous but in a slightly unconventional way. It suited me fine considering that I dye my hair bright yellow and I’m sure that to a lot of people, I’m not good-looking in a conventional way. I like looking like sunshine on hot summer days and that’s never going to change. I am who I am and the people I attempt to date have to be okay with that, really.

So, Valentin was pretty damn smooth about things. He could slip in a sweet little compliment out of nowhere and he’d mean it. The first few times he did it, it startled me into silence while I looked him over from head to toe, trying to see if he was just trying to butter me up so we could detour to the nearest bed. Usually, it wasn’t the case, he was just being a sweetheart for no other reason than he could.

We sort of dated—if I could consider what we were doing dating—for about a week. During that time, I ended up spending every other night with him. Our nights were long and pleasurable and despite that whole thing, I usually was up as early as my nickname might suggest. I never sleep in late.

So, on the final morning that I woke up and things ended up not working out, he told me that I did bring light in his life—sometimes—but at other times, he did wish I wouldn’t wake him up so early.

I’ll be honest, I might have been caught so off guard by the deeply frustrated tone of his voice that I packed my few things back up and I left. I probably should have stayed for us to talk things through because I’m sure there was a reason for his behaviour that morning, but I couldn’t. We’d spent the night doing what rabbits do and we’d enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, we’d had a nap, we’d fucked some more, and we’d settled in for more sleep.

Now, I feel as though I have to point out that every time I woke up early, I’d sort of just slip out of his arms carefully—he was deep asleep, his breathing slow and even—and I left him a little note by his phone to tell him that I was on my way back home to my place.

Not once in the times that I slipped out of bed did I end up waking him. Not once did I force him to get up at the ass crack of dawn because I was wide awake, and I might have wanted him in me one more time before I went back home. Nope. I let him sleep, I slipped out as silently as I could, and I made my way home.

I know that it’s possibly my fault that this one relationship is over. I should know better, I don’t think I could even really call anything based on sex a relationship, not one that might last any proper length of time. I really do know better, that’s the thing. I could be wrong and there could be the potential of finding someone who would want a relationship out of something that started with lust but I’m not holding my breath.

Valentin hasn’t tried to contact me since that morning and I’m not gonna lie, I haven’t made the effort myself at this point. I don’t know what it was about his tone that set me off like that. Usually, I’d take that kind of comment with a bit of a laugh but that’d be about it in the end. I’d laugh it off, we’d talk and that would be that.

So, I just don’t know.

Final Word Count: 806

Some people are too kind for this world. You? Definitely not one of them.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: May 9, 2023

Character: Florian Berg
Race: Human
Age: 37
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

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Have I ever gotten so frustrated with someone that I decided that I was done with having them in my life? Yes, but it’s been a very rare occurrence. Most likely due to my mellow nature. My ex has been one of these people and I don’t like to rehash my past. There’s a reason, other than his constant me-me-me attitude that led me to my decision, and I’ve had no real regrets since. I didn’t care to have him in my life long-term and I still feel as though it took me too long to get to that point as is.

He frustrated me because of his self-centred behaviour but, on the other hand, I have met a few people who were just too selfless and while I think that selflessness can be good in certain situations, too much of it isn’t. Too much selflessness will, at times, possibly not always, lead you to be taken advantage of and they allow it to happen because they believe that it’s all right that others are taking advantage of them. I have fairly big issues with that kind of behaviour, I won’t lie.

Listen to me, venting half-hearted frustrations about people in the world. You’d think that I’ve been having a bad day but furthest from. It’s just been a fairly quiet, slow day and even mellow as I am, slow days leave me feeling introspective and when I get that way, I think about the people I’ve crossed in my mind. The good, the bad, the ones that shouldn’t have left a mark but did. All of them.

On days like these, when even the weather outside is mocking me and we pretty much have to stay inside unless we wish to be drowned rats, I find myself thinking about the institute. It’s that one subject we don’t actually talk about, not in the house. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has days when the memories do crop up.

We had no interactions with anyone other than the staff and one another. If there were others in the huge building that I knew we were in, we never got to meet them and it was possibly for the best, I’m sure. No point in ruining whatever environment we were supposed to be in, with the presence of others that had nothing to do with the study they were doing on us.

I don’t know if it’s quite right to call the people who walked us from room to room nurses. They were scientists, I’m certain, but they weren’t the ones administering the drugs; at least not in my case. I do remember one nurse, though. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to have been around that one particular scene, but I’d been. My own nurse-slash-whatever had just shoved Kaleb back into his room. He’s the oldest one of us and while he’s not the one who spent the most time at the institute, he was there first and he was the first one they released, too.

I liked him, even though I only saw him for not-quite a year before he was out after I’d come in. I didn’t like the way they were usually fairly rough with him and on that particular day, I heard the man walking him back to his room muttering about how some people were too kind for this world but him—Kaleb—no, he was not one of them. I don’t know that it really was the words he spoke that stayed with me so much as his tone. I still remember it now decades later.

There was something in his tone that made him sound as though he thought we were the lowest of the low and that, just maybe, we were in this situation because we’d wanted to, and we were druggies out of choice. I’d never once before in my life touched the drug that they tested on me for those seven or so years and, again, while I feel as though I’d had it fairly easily, I still didn’t have it that easy when it came to sobering up.

They cut me off the day they set me free, and, in my case, I suppose it was possibly all right, but I don’t know that some of them could have gone cold turkey on the drug they had been tested on them for years. None of us were set free at the same time and I’m still a little surprised that we managed to stick together in the long run, but I wouldn’t change my life even if I could. These guys are my family and people can rot somewhere in hell if they think we’re not deserving of being seen as good people.

Final Word Count: 794

You can’t just tape me to the ceiling and leave me here!

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: April 15, 2023

Character: Yannick Beaumont
Race: Human
Age: 35
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

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I know that there’s a lot I haven’t experienced in life. With the way my younger years happened—and that of my mates—there is plenty that I never had time to experience. I was two when they took me into the institute—the third youngest and ironically the third one they kept longest—so at sixteen when they released me, they’d taken care of all of my schooling up until this point and my social interactions had always come from the brief group time that they allowed us together.

Running around with other kids was an unknown to me until I saw kids playing in parks. Socializing with others was hard at first but, as the lot of us grouped back together over the years, we helped one another overcome all that had been missing in our lives.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments, even now, almost twenty years later, when I end up scratching my head and wondering if I’m either doing the wrong thing or if I haven’t confused one thing with another. It isn’t all that common, but it isn’t an absolute unknown. Most of us are this way, I think.

So certainly, at times, when I find myself just randomly scrolling through short videos on one site or another, I stumble upon videos that are supposed to be a throwback to ‘if you were a kid between these years’ or ‘who remembers x thing that happened when you were y years old’ and I can only scratch my head in confusion.

One of the most recent examples of this—that I even had to ask the others about just to be sure it wasn’t me—was about how, back then, some teenagers would have these gaming parties of sorts but it was with the bulky computer screens and whatnot and one of them would somehow be taped to the ceiling because they needed more room? I just didn’t know. But it was the guy in the skit crying out after his mates about how they certainly just couldn’t leave him taped up there now that everything was gone and over with that confused me.

Even if that really was a thing—again, I grew up in a sheltered place with no outside contact and very limited access to things that could give us ‘ideas’ about means to escape our fates or something—why would you even want to leave someone taped up to the ceiling once all was said and done? Is that really a thing friends will do to friends?

So many things that pertain to how children and teenagers behaved towards one another just confuse me. I want to understand those things that I didn’t have access to. I don’t want to feel as though I’m somehow alienated because I didn’t have the kind of experience that most kids have.

Now, I know that this is a somewhat generalizing way of looking at things. From watching the news or other places, I know for a fact that the whole world is very different depending on where you’re from. I know that not everything everywhere in the world is sweet and sugar and candy and perfect, but I am speaking in terms of what I’ve had to deal with around here and things I’ve seen on the Internet.

I usually don’t stay stuck on something this long but the idea of someone being taped to a ceiling just sits wrong with me. I think it might have to do that if I’d been in that situation, I would have been worried stupid about my hair. That thing, even when braided, gets everywhere. There is so much hair for me to deal with—hair that I love, thank you quite much—that I don’t know that there would have been any safe way for me to secure that hair in a semi-long-term way for them to tape me up somewhere.

It’s really strange, at times, the things you do end up thinking about. The things that make as little sense as possible. Not helpful to this situation is the fact that yeah, I have plenty of time to think about these pointless things when it’s just so quiet at work that I’m almost twiddling my thumbs. After I lost my last job, I took a bit of a breather and found something else. I’m still surrounded by books but this one is more a proper library than a bookstore; I do like it and the hours aren’t so bad. Certainly, more than I was getting at the last place and since it’s possibly a little more in the centre of things, fewer people seem to want to avoid me.

It’s been a plus and I’ve been grateful for that.

Final Word Count: 796

How am I meant to repay my debt when you keep insisting that I go away?

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Current Date: August 11, 2022

Character: Elia Valerio
Race: Human
Age: 38
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
 

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Working at the flower shop has its ups and downs. I’m pretty sure that no matter where I might otherwise decide to work if I were to somehow do something stupid, and decide to look for work elsewhere, that this new place would have its ups and downs too. That’s just one of those things that life offers. Even just daily life tends to have its hills and valleys in the end.

It’s not something I really was all that familiar with up until we got out of the institute. I was the second one in and the second one out. Only Kaleb was out by the time they released me, and I found myself drawn to him as though it made all the sense in the world. Together, we waited on the others. It wasn’t even that we’d spent all that much time together at the institute but there still was a bond there. Don’t ask me to explain how it just did.

So yes, I’m more than aware that if I were to decide to look for a new job—which I have no desire to—I wouldn’t really be getting away from the potential drama. I just have to deal with this one and I figure that in a few weeks, it’ll be as though nothing had ever happened. This I know for a fact because it’s not the first time it happens, and I know that it won’t be the last time.

When it last happened, I was the one who had to deal with it because I’m the one who essentially caught him with his hand in the tip jar. I only saw it happen from my spot closer to the back this time around but I’m not the one who caught him and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with him, not one-on-one, in any case.

Last time, I told him not to do it again and to get the hell out before I called the cops. He scampered, then came back the following day, meek as could be, but thanked me for not calling the cops on him. For a few days after that, he kept on coming back, telling me that he wanted to repay this debt he now was stuck with and that he couldn’t do that if I kept on telling him to get out.

The bosses are aware of his behaviour. They know he’s going to do it again and again but he’s so slow about it that it’s like he’s trying to get caught so someone will pay him attention. On that same note, our little tip jar is usually fairly empty, it’s mostly in case someone might be short a little on the money they need to pay for the bouquet or arrangement they’re buying. At the most, it’s a handful of roubles, in the end.

So now it’s Sofia’s turn to be stuck dealing with him and he seems just so enamoured by her in a general sense that I don’t know how long or not it’s going to last. Sofia is a sweet young woman who is so mousy that you would wonder if she wouldn’t best be part of the wallpaper. She loves being surrounded by flowers, however. She’s not so great at preparing the arrangements or the bouquets but that’s all right. It gives me more time to handle the flowers myself while she takes care of the customers.

He’s come by every day since the day she caught him, at this point. This isn’t unusual behaviour from him after being caught. What tells me that he’s likely infatuated with her is the fact that he’s actually come by twice every day. At most, last time, when I was dealing with him, he’d come around near the end of the day, looking like a kicked puppy, asking what he could do to repay his debt and I’d just remind him to get back outside if he wasn’t buying anything.

Now, he’s come once in the early mornings and he usually comes around not long after lunch when it’s quieter in the shop and, well, Sofia doesn’t have the heart to tell him to get out. He hasn’t really caused any issues so far since he tends to crop up when the shop is quiet but one of these days, a client is going to complain and we’re going to have to do something about it.

When he turns his sad little eyes on her and asks her to tell him what he can do to repay the debt he now has towards her as a thank you for not calling the cops, she just gets completely flustered and, well, it’s strange but still cute in its own way, I guess. I just hope she learns to put her foot down before too long.

Final Word Count: 811

The only advice I can offer is this: stay out of the lake at all times.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Characters: Kaede Mori
Race: Human
Age: 35
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
Final Word Count: 815 words
 

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I only have very vague memories of my life before the NISD, and my time spent there is something I spend very little time actually thinking about. I don’t want to remember what they put us through while we were there, so I try not to think about it. I don’t know whether or not I should consider myself lucky, or unlucky that they picked me up on that day. I was so very far from where we ended up, I don’t know why they snatched me.

I mean, my parents had just died, they’d had no family other than one another, and I was going to end up with who knew how many other kids in a group home and even young and at that age, I knew I didn’t want to be there. I’d heard plenty of horror stories though they very well could just have been rumours that my parents had told me to make sure I behaved. I lost track of how often they threatened to send me off if they had to.

I was seven when they took me away and the rest of that is history.

For years, when I was floating away during their studies, I think that my mind floated back to my parents. I floated back to the life I might have had before. One of the places that my mind often took me on a ride to, while I was dealing with the effects of the drugs. In a way, I think I held on to those memories to try and ignore the effects that withdrawal had on me. It was one of those things I hated. They’d dose me, watch the effect, keep soft-dosing me for a few days usually and then they’d let me come down and take more notes. They’d repeat the process.

At least, that’s what I remember of it, but I know I might be wrong. That’s okay, though.

In my memories, I often found myself on the edge of a lake that I distinctly remember my mother telling me to never go anywhere near. This is one of the only memories I truly have that paints her as possibly being a good mother.

I don’t why she was so adamant about keeping away from that lake. In a way, I think her words were more about how I had to stay out of that lake but in the memories, I had while I was high, it really was more about just keeping away from it in a general sense.

After my release, I stopped thinking about it at all for some time. Then, some years ago, for reasons I’m still not even completely sure of, I read a text or a study somewhere about a lake up here and it brought back the memory I’d had of mom and her warnings about the lake back home. It all seems just so random, I’m not even sure why I dug deeper about it all but I did.

I can’t even really find any information on the lake from my memories. It’s as though it never existed, and my mind might have made it all up. The one way to really make sure would be to get a ticket and go back home, back to that one place that I hadn’t really thought of or seen as home in a really long time. At this point, it’s not something I even really want to do. I just want to leave ‘home’ far away. That home, the house of my childhood, the place where I grew up until I was moved to the group home, it’s not home. Not in the sense of where the heart is.

My little, cold and bitchy heart calls this place home, right here with my friends. Right here with these other souls who have gone through things similar to mine and know how effed up life can be because of that study they put us through. I know that this is one of the reasons why we’re all still together. While we weren’t all in the institute at the same time and for the same number of years, we did spend some time together and it just created a bond.

I’m not about to buy a plane ticket to go back to Japan to try and find an elusive lake when I know that it’s not going to give me any of the answers I might want or even need at this point. So, what if I don’t ever find out if that lake from my memory is real? So, what if I don’t find out why my mother was so adamant that I never step into its water? My parents are dead, it was decades ago, I don’t know that going back to this tiny little village would offer me any answers, so I just won’t bother.

We have no need for wishes? Speak for yourself, I’ll take them!

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Characters: Florian Berg
Race: Human
Age: 36
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
Final Word Count: 857 words
 

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Our home has its ups and downs. I think that every single place where there will be more than one person living—in a way, I think that even people living alone go through this—will have ups and downs. This is part of life, in a way. It is part of how things are and how they should be. It’s not my place to judge how these people handle said ups and downs. There are so many factors in someone’s life that you can’t just point your finger at someone and tell them that they should have reacted in this particular way when they reacted in a completely different one.

It’s not all that common that any of us will look back on the life we had before now. We’ll look back on what happened when we were younger, some seventeen-something years ago. Yeah, we keep track of our date of release, I think it was the one first truly positive thing that happened in our lives. Now, I know I can’t complain. I’ve had it easy compared to the others. The days spent alone weren’t fun, but the drug they had me on for those years wasn’t as life-changing as the others, at not as drastically.

Anyway.

There’s a reason I’m the mellow one of the group and we do all like to tease one another gently about traits that have remained with us since our release. That teasing, at times, will fall flat but I think that we’re all so in tune with one another that we’ll realize that fairly quickly. I think that we have far more ups than downs, but life has a way with things.

For the brief blips of times that we actually got to spend together at the institute, I remember that, at one point, we had a running joke about wishes. There was plenty that we each were instructed to not talk about; it was different for all of us—something we discovered as we did get to spend that bit of time together.

For the most part, I think I had it easiest and I’d be repeating myself if I went into that. When the running joke got started, I’m possibly the one that had first muttered it. We were every so often set to a room together when we all were drugged, but at times, for whatever sick science they were after, they would set us together when we would either be sober or in the process of coming down from whatever high we’d been working through.

Coming down, for me, was never very hard. I remember, in a way, that the institute was better than what I’d had before. I was fifteen when they picked me up and I’d been on the street before, so the others, who had been there just so much longer than I had, would often roll their eyes and groan when I mentioned having no wish whatsoever to get out there. It was fairly early on during my day there, so I suppose that I can’t blame them for their reaction.

That little thing did stay with us through the years, even now. When someone just mentions the word wish, we all sort of look at one another and we have these little smiles hiding at the corner of our mouths because it brings us back.

You know, I have no idea why they released us. I have no idea if they were doing other types of studies like these in the building. The place was huge. I remember when I first walked up to it, and I remember when they rather unceremoniously dumped us outside with what little they’d bought for us to wear over the years that still was in good shape. We had a sort of short corridor—a wing, I guess—to ourselves. Our rooms were scattered along the corridor and down the corner, we had the room where we could hang out at times, I never ate food with any of them, that had always been brought to my room.

Man, this goes back so long, I don’t even know why I started thinking about it all recently. There must have been something mentioned by someone. Not that I hate it, it’s just a strange reminder of what we all had to live through in the long run. I don’t think that any of us ever looked back. I hated it, at first, when they just dumped us out the way they did but I learned to adapt to this new world again. I was older, I had a small bit of pocket change—we all did—and we managed to make it, so I can’t say that I’d want to head back there.

We’ve all been sober since leaving the place. I think I should have possibly realized something was wrong when they slowly—thankfully for all of us, I’ve learned—stopped giving us the drugs, as though preparing us for our trip back into the world. There are too many unknowns and I’m not interested in digging up information about any of it.