Midori stirs as the sunlight lifts her eyelids. At first the ceiling above her is blurry, and only after a few blinks does it reveal itself as a cheap construction of ready-made steel girders and corrugated sheet. Her body feels like a burlap sack filled to the brim with sand, limply sprawled out on the cold concrete floor, her head propped up by a pile of industrial rubble.

Midori: What the…

She clutches her head. It feels cold. Too cold. Dead cold. And yet she is alive, her bones cracking and her atrophied muscles aching as she attempts to sit up. It’s a struggle, like wading through tar, but she manages, bringing herself high up enough to have a look and take in the surroundings. They aren’t exactly unfamiliar — she knows what a warehouse looked like — but she can’t for the life of her remember why she’d wake up in one. 

Especially since she isn’t alone. Dozens of unconscious bodies are scattered about the concrete around her, too pale and immobile to be sleeping, but too anguished in their expressions to be dead. Midori realizes she can touch one of them without even scooting closer. It’s no warmer than she is.

With a groan, she rises to her feet, stepping away from her spot in the middle of the pile to count the bodies. They look as if they were dumped here, like excess cargo to be retrieved — or disposed of — later, and have been treated as such, too, many of them battered and bruised, swollen hands tied behind their backs with zip ties. Midori isn’t a medical student, but she knows what a broken wrist looks like.

Midori: Shit, man… What the hell is going on?

Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that she appears to be mostly alright. Aside from the stiffness that comes with waking up after days of unconsciousness, she lacks any noticeable bruises, let alone fractures, and unlike the other bodies, her hands were not tied when she woke up. But why? The last thing she remembers is arguing with her sister and her mother as the latter suddenly fell asleep at the wheel and the car—

Midori: Koharu!

In a panic, she begins checking the bodies, but her sister is nowhere to be found among them. In fact, the large majority of them appear to be middle-aged men, many of them dressed in tattered suits, as if they had gotten mugged on their way home from an office job. As she turned one body over, however, she realized that this particular middle-aged man she had seen before.

Midori: … Vice-principal Sugimoto?

Suddenly, the man opens his eyes, causing her to shrink back in a panic and yelp, which the man mirrors in response.

Sugimoto: W-Who are you?

Midori: It’s… It’s me, Midori Shirahara! … From the class that graduated two years ago?

Sugimoto: Shirahara? … God, right… there used to be another one… But w-what in heaven’s name is going on here… How long have I been unconscious? Is this some kind of prank?

Midori: Your guess is as good as mine, but… I, err—Wait, you don’t think I was the one who kidnapped you, right?

Sugimoto: Then care to explain why I can’t use my hands, when yours appear to not even have been bound at all!

Midori: Look, I can assure you this is not a—Whoa! (setting a few steps back, she stumbles over another unconscious man, causing him to rise from his slumber as well) A-Ah, sir… D-Don’t panic, we’ll figure this out, I just need you to—

Of course, panicking is exactly what the man does once he comes to his senses and finds out that he too, has been tied up and struggles to move around in any way that matters. Kneeling down next to him, Midori urges him to calm down.

Midori: Lemme look for something to cut those zip ties with, if you’d just—

Sugimoto: Cut me loose, young lady! What are you even waiting for?

Midori: I’m working on it! Believe me, sir,  I’m as in the dark as you are about this whole business,  and— (turning around to look at the vice-principal as she responds, she suddenly falls silent as a brief “snipping” sound cuts through the tension, and the plastic straps tying Sugimoto’s wrists fall to the ground)

???: … There you go, Mr. Vice-principal.

As Sugimoto stands up and turns around, clutching his wrist, the woman who cut him loose hands him another sharp piece of scrap metal, urging him to untie the other fellow hostages.

Midori: … M-Mom?

Hikari: Midori? Where’s Koharu?

Midori: I… I dunno. She’s not here, but… We were in that car accident because you fell asleep and then there… (she frowns) … a masked man?

Hikari: Wait… Did you say a… masked man? You saw him too?

Midori: Looks like we’ve got our kidnapper, then… But wait… (she checks her wristwatch, a dated, secondhand model from the early 1990s) … what kind of drug knocks you out for twenty days?

Hikari: And we’re all waking up at the same time, too… Not to mention our current predicament. I think it’s fair to say that whoever made us go down, didn’t expect us to be up just yet… (with a sigh, she gazes off into the distance, muttering) That masked man, though… Was I in that… world again?

Midori: Sorry, but this just doesn’t make any goddamn sense. We’d just picked Koharu up, we were… arguing and you just lost consciousness all of a sudden—

Hikari: No… I saw Koharu, too. She… She was there, calling out to me… in that world…

Midori: … That world? 

Hikari: … She tried to save us, she…

Midori: Oh, now you’re gonna treat her like your daughter? Are you kidding me?

Hikari: I… Look, we can figure out what happened to us — all of us — later on, but right now, we need to help everyone to their feet. (she hands Midori a slightly rusty metal shard as well) Lend me a hand, ‘kay?

In the meantime, several of the men have regained consciousness, and after Sugimoto cuts them loose, manage to stand up, many of them groaning and clutching their heads, and some striking up a conversation with the person nearest to them. Frowning as she hears some of the men talking about the last thing they remember — violent mobs breaking into their houses and knocking them out — Hikari rouses the last remaining sleepers from their slumbers, visibly agitated.

Hikari: Come on. We need to get out of here.

Midori: I don’t even know where “here” is, to be hon— (she gasps when the sudden rattle of machine gun fire sends a shockwave through the warehouse, causing her, and many others, to instinctively duck for cover)

Hikari: (she hisses through her teeth) … Shit.

Staying low, Midori holds her breath and sneaks over to the nearest window. Rising to the tips of her toes, she peeks through it, and through the dirt on the glass, notices a good dozen or so heavily armed men standing guard at the entrance to the warehouse. One of them has just opened fire on a makeshift shooting gallery of beer bottles, and as another one, still wearing a bright red baseball cap with “YASUDA FOR MAYOR” on it, replaces the broken bottles with intact ones, the gunman makes way for one of his colleagues, who doesn’t wait for his red-capped colleague to get to safety before taking his shots. As another salvo sounds, Midori lowers herself out of sight, grimacing as she faces her mother and the other hostages.

Midori: We’re not walking out of here…There’s, like, fifteen dudes. Armed to the teeth.

Hikari: I don’t assume anyone here has a portable phone battery that’s still got some juice in it?

No one responds, just a few of the men shaking their heads as they try to remember how moving their bodies is supposed to work.

Hikari: Then we’re gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way… With a plan.

Midori: Why does it sound like you’re speaking from experience?

Hikari: I’ve snuck into my fair share of lions’ dens in the past, sweetie. Sneaking out shouldn’t be a lot harder…