Being discharged from the hospital was a surprisingly quiet affair. Over the course of these past few days, Rina had come to understand that ‘Users’—apparently such as herself—were highly valued people. 

Uhm. Well. Rina silently swept her gaze around to search for the paparazzi, but they remained nowhere to be seen. 

“……” It seems like she wasn’t as valuable as everyone had made out. 

In embarrassment and maybe a sprinkle of shame, Rina had quickly made her way out of the parking lot that was directly connected to the hospital’s second entrance; and out onto a main street. 

The moment she steps out back into society, she pauses. Everything was foreign, from the letterboxes and bus stops that had been fully digitized; to the cars and their ergonomic, wind-resistant designs. If that wasn’t enough to get her to balk, all around her were skyscrapers. A lot of them were built with an obsidian type of glass that looked both sleek and intimidating. 

Everything just — the stylings were so heavily futuristic that Rina felt she had traveled to a different world or something. 

Actually. She’d felt that way ever since waking up. 

Users? Hunters? A System? The world around her felt like it was more suited to be a work of fiction. Specifically, those tower-climbing fantasy manhwas that were all the rage the time before she’d apparently taken her sleeping beauty cosplay a little bit too serious. 

Rina sighed. 

Currently, she wasn’t anywhere she recognised. Yes, there was a hospital within distance of her apartment but it was blatantly not… this one. There was no familiar face to greet her, either, nor any landmarks she was used to knowing. Rina was somehow both disorientated and.. numb. 

Was it the coma? It was probably the coma.

-epbeepbeep-!

She jolts.

The light at the crossing had turned green when she wasn’t paying attention. 

—EEEP! 

.. the second jarring noise, however, wasn’t from the traffic light but an impatient driver. In retaliation, when she’s half-way across the road, she throws up her middle finger. 

“Oi!” The driver even went so far as to lean out of their window so that she knew they meant business. 

Rina snorted at the stupidity of it all.

After safely walking to the other side, Rina had to forcefully resist the urge to look back over her shoulder. The crosswalk wasn’t that far from the hospital— in fact, if she turned around and walked a couple steps back, she would be back in the hospital’s parking lot..

At that, she can’t help but remember the crowd that didn’t await her. Don’t get her wrong — Rina didn’t actually want a parade of, like, government agents to swarm the hospital looking for her or anything! Just.. she wasn’t expecting to be left entirely alone?? It was kind of bizarre, right? Especially when she'd just earlier been bombarded with information from all sources of media in which the content constantly covered the lives of Users..! 

Olivia really was a menace.

Phones, tablets, the TV hanging on the wall; hell, Olivia had even gotten her busy hands on a newspaper(which were surprisingly still in production)! So yeah. The lack of interest from any sort of media outlet or government ‘agent’ was rather.. disappointing. Or odd, however you looked at it.

To be completely honest though, Rina sort of prefers it this way. She had never been one to put her business on blast so this unprecedented sense of privacy(?) couldn’t be anything but a good thing.

Well, there was no point dwelling on it. 

The walk back to her apartment was quiet, but that was only because she was absorbed in her own little world acting as a tourist to these unfamiliar sights.

Bzzt. “IN 40 YARDS TURN LEFT ONTO E-..”

“@&#!£/!!” Rina let out a bunch of gibberish as she scrambled to turn off the voice on the mapping app she’d had open on her phone. She embarrassingly looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to her. 

The suited man who’d froze and made eye contact with her said nothing and just stared straight into her soul.

Rina says, “Hello, goodbye!”

The man flinches. She gets it—really. Between her disturbing the public peace, and her suddenly greeting this guy on the street… It was no wonder. 

She broke eye contact before it got too awkward and continued on her way.

……

Luckily she apparently lived within walking distance of the hospital, and--wait, had that signage always been there? It was a big neon-yellow board that read ‘You Are Now Entering New London Area’ that was just.. floating up in the air. Cool.

Rina looked at her location on her dated phone... so she was still going in the right direction, good. 

The hospital staff, upon her discharge, had given her all her stuff she’d had on her person prior to entering a coma. Which included her wallet, phone, headphones, half a pack of gum, and what she had been wearing; it was just jeans that made her ass look bootylicious, and an oversized hoodie which completely hid that fact. Her phone was a familiar weight in her hand, but when she’d been booting it up at the reception desk, they’d look at her with a hint of pity. Like, what? But now that she’s been outside she gets it, really. 

Her ‘gear’ was practically ancient. It was a surprise it even still worked. 

Anyway, on the map app she’d had open, the pin drop that signaled her apartment wasn’t that far anymore, in fact, it seemed to be somewhere in this “new london area”. 

She takes a few close steps until eventually she passes beneath the sign and almost immediately feels something blanket over her shoulders. 

Rina coughs, and coughs, and continues coughing until someone walks up to her and gently pats her back, guiding her out of the way of other pedestrians who didn't give her a side glance. 

“First time visiting, huh.” It wasn’t a question. Rina blinks tears out from her eyes and looks at them. 

She regrets it. 

“You’ll get used to it,” they say when she remains speechless. Rina continued to dumbly stare at them when they waved a hand in front of her face. “Hello?”

… oh. So she did hear them speak? Rina thought she’d imagined that. After all, nobody in real life dressed like they were about to go on a modern day crusade. 

“H-hi,” she stuttered. They dropped their hand from her back and she took the chance to take a step away from them. Rina hoped whatever illness they had wasn’t contagious.

“She speaks!” They cheered rather loudly. Their yellow—yellow, not blonde, good god—hair was loud enough. “Do you need some water?” They dig into their layered robes and pull out a clear flask. “I have some here you could-”

Why did she get the feeling it was holy water.

“No, thank you!” Rina quickly rejects their goodwill. Her father taught her not to accept substances of suspicious origins, and this entire person was of suspicious origin. 

They open their mouth—probably to try and get her to appeal—but she beats them to it and hopes it doesn’t sound too offensive when she says, “ I should get going now. Bye.” At some point, they’d migrated to the mouth of an alley. Luckily they didn’t drag her into it mid-convo. Rina quickly steps back out onto the pathway and waves them goodbye before they can recover from her sudden departure enough to follow after her. 

At her back, the good samaritan drops the look of shock from their face. At once it becomes a blank canvas, and the ‘flask’ in their hand dissolves into pale green mist. They calmly pull the hood of their cloak up above their head. 

“The Last is headed your way,” they mumble. No-one bats an eye as they blend in with the other busy-goers on the street. Almost as if they were a ghost, the people don’t react even when they brush against their shoulders. 

“Just like we thought, she hasn’t Awakened yet. Be careful.”

|| Understood. || 

……

Since when was her flat part of a gated community? Rina dumbly stood in front of metal gates wondering as such. 

“YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DES-”

Thank you and goodbye!

After learning her lesson, Rina calmly ended the route tracking that led her here and pocketed her phone. The gate towered above her, a pale white with a glow to it that made it look ethereal to anyone who didn’t know any better.

Rina didn’t know any better and thought it was made of angel bones or something. It glittered too much.

Just being in the vicinity of the gate lightens that heavy feeling that sat across her shoulders the moment she’d entered this ‘New London Area’. It kind of felt like she’d stumbled into a dungeon instance. 

But that couldn’t be right? 

Whatever. Rina was all big dick energy and not, like, big brains anything. 

Taking a step back, she turns her head this way and that, to look for an entrance—or keypad at least, that would maybe open a door she couldn’t see. 

There wasn’t one. 

However when she goes to touch the bars because, frankly, her fingers had been itching to cop a feel the moment she’d laid eyes on it; a slow line of white neon light draws a square on the bars, scarily accurate to the size of herself. Rina then pushed the bar and whistled when it parted for her liked the red sea. She was mildly impressed at the display of high-tech. Or was it.. magic? An otherworldly material? She hadn’t forgotten about the interdimensional Gates.

Behind her the gate closes. She looks down at her palm that came into contact with the bars. There was no residue, sadly, so no magical angel powers for her. 

Boo.

Apart from that weird gate around the front, nothing else changed. She enters the communal hallway, is glad that there’s no one around, and climbs up to the third floor where her flat lies. 

When she reaches the landing, her front door is.. it's warded off with some kind of holographic tape. On it, the words read: [HOSPITALIZED… HOSPITALIZED... HOSPIT-] You get the drift. There’s nothing physical to touch, which she should know because she’d just tried to do so.

Her fingers pass right through it. The whole thing was kind of stupid in her opinion. No, it was a lot of stupid. 

Wouldn’t this just be a big fat sign for burglars? It pretty much announced no one was home, and wouldn’t be home, indefinitely. 

Behind the tape she finally notices a concave slot that she supposes acted as a handle. She puts her hand on it, fingers once again passing through the hologram—which then disappears when the door miraculously opens when Rina gives the weird handle a yank. 

“……” 

Was her DNA encoded in it or something? The same kind of thing had happened with that gate downstairs. But did everything have to be keyless? Rina wasn’t sure she liked it but she could just be a boomer or something. 

She doesn't even want to think about why or how her DNA is in the system. It's got to have been a major privacy violation.

When she steps into her flat, the hallway light surprisingly turns on when she flicks the switch. It was weird that she even had electricity, but she guesses with the whole building upgrade, things had changed. Or was it that she was on some sort of monthly allowance for her comatose state which allowed for both her rent to continue being paid, and utility bills accounted for? 

That.. would make more sense actually.

At the doorway, she flings her shoes off and walks through the rest of her apartment barefoot. 

Seeing everything stay the same but with a light dusting of.. dust, Rina had a sense of deja vu? It was either that or nostalgia, maybe. She couldn’t really describe it clearly as one or the other. Either way she kind of felt like crying.

When she entered the narrow kitchen, predictably, there was no food in either the cupboards or the fridge. Not even a cup noodle she was pretty sure she stocked up on for the year. Someone must’ve come into her apartment to clear it out because she remembers having a bunch of leftovers refrigerated. If they hadn’t then Rina’s pretty sure she would’ve come back to the entire place being some biodome hazard. 

It’s a good thing she wasn’t hungry then- yet. She should go shopping some time soon. Otherwise she was likely to forget and then her future starving self would make a terrible dietary decision and order the sloppiest, oiliest takeaway on the planet. 

Yeah, no.

Finishing up the short tour of her flat, Rina grabbed a bunch of clothes that had the least moldy smell and moth holes in, and then went to have a shower. Freshening up doesn’t change her mood any, but it does alert her to how hungry she really was. After one, long blameful gaze towards the closed door of her empty fridge, Rina quickly decides to go for a quick food shop.

If only she hadn’t.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

The hairs on the back of her neck and bare forearm stood up to attention. Goosebumps. 

With a shiver, Rina glanced over her shoulder. There was nothing there, just as there hadn’t been five minutes ago when this unsettling feeling had made itself at home in the pit of her stomach. 

Was she just nervous? Anxious, even? This was the first time she had been out in public, sans leaving the hospital, and the world had changed enough around her for it to be off putting. 

Maybe Rina was simply panicking? 

She gripped the shopping bags in her hand just that bit tighter. It was odd enough that there was no one manning the tills, but the entire neighborhood was like a ghost town! There were scarcely any cars that passed by, and because they were so little in appearance, Rina had specifically paid attention to them.

What she had noticed, shockingly, was that there was no one driving them! The passengers, however…

Was that Olivia?

She’d met the woman barely hours ago, and being the first person Rina had seen once she’d woken up meant it wasn’t a face or figure she could easily forget the image of! But before she could dwell on it any longer, the phone in her pocket vibrates.

[ [ To the local residents: the nationwide recommended curfew is still in effect. However for the affected Areas being listed below, it is Mandatory for those living in these areas to remain indoors until the Hunters have completed their designated subjugations!

Affected Regions:

• New London Area

• Northwest

• West

Those currently within these jurisdictions, please remain calm. The Hunters responsible for these territories have all been dispatched! ] ]

!!!

Hey. Why weren’t there any familiar names of London districts, boroughs and such listed? Like Ealing in the West, or Brent in the Northwest?? Instead it was literally just noted as ‘Northwest’, and ‘West’. Don’t tell her… the ‘New London Area’ was really the new London area..?!

Between the hospital and the whole journey towards her flat, there hadn't been an obvious difference she had spotted… but.. didn't she have a reaction as soon as she stepped under that neon sign? There was a clue there somewhere, she just knew it. 

Maybe this whole Gate business was more serious than she thought.