Might as well start this while I'm in an app-writing mood. Emphasis on 'start,' and not 'finish.'
Name: Kariya Koki (or Koki Kariya, if you go Western.)
Canon: The World Ends With You
History:
An undetermined amount of time prior to the start of The World Ends With You, Kariya died and played a round of the Reaper's Game. He presumably survived, but didn't win, and chose to become a Reaper. (Things might've happened slightly differently, but...details.)
Time passed. At some point he met Yashiro Uzuki and the two ended up partnering up, working together to erase Players during games and presumably spending time together when not...their banter wouldn't be so easy and their teamwork as seamless if it was otherwise.
Week 1
Kariya, and by extension Uzuki, appear early on: immediately after the opening finishes playing (while elsewhere, Neku runs from frogs while wondering what the heck's going on) they're shown standing on a rooftop. They banter and exposit...it's the first game in a while, first time for them in a long while to rack up points, and to liven things up the two of them might as well play a game: Reaper sport 3, a Player hunt. Loser buys the winner ramen.
Uzuki goes after the main characters while Kariya, presumably, erases Players off screen for the next few days.
Day 4 rolls around. The Players are lulled by a seemingly easy mission, which is when Uzuki and Kariya make their move and unleash a trap, resulting in erasing Rhyme. They then make their official introductions:
Neku: Reapers?
Kariya: Bingo! I’m Koki Kariya. And this is Uzuki Yashiro. There. Now that we’re all friends---
Beat: Hey! What did you do with Rhyme?
Uzuki: Um...hello? You just saw. She’s gone. Erased. Noise food. Game over.
Kariya: Her soul’s just another speck of Shibuya space dust.
They taunt Beat a bit more before leaving. Time passes.
Day 7 comes. As Neku and Shiki prepare to face the Game Master, Kariya and Uzuki are standing on a familiar rooftop, relaxing...Uzuki sighs about how boring Day 7 is for lack of players, and Kariya talks about how it's the first of many more days off...he hopes. They're interrupted by Beat, who wants answers. Uzuki's in favor of erasing him, but Kariya...eh, let Beat ask, maybe he'll answer.
Week 2
Week 2 starts much the same as the first. They're standing on a rooftop, Kariya sighing about work again while Uzuki's excited about the opportunity for extra points...which promptly gets derailed when they get the call and are told to wait on standby. (Sho Minamoto's GM this round, a guy who's excellent on most counts but fails when it comes to working with others.) Kariya doesn't mind, Uzuki's mileage varies.
Day 2 comes. Kariya's busy testing the walls, discovering that Minamoto was very thorough and very quick when it came to sealing off routes...rather slow when it came to telling the Reapers about the change. Ah, well, nothing too bad. (Uzuki's mileage, naturally, varies.) They start to engage in their usual banter, when they're interrupted by what Kariya identifies as Taboo Noise: a special form of Noise which targets everything, Reapers included. Uzuki bothers HQ, and Kariya...ponders.
The next day they're spotted in the Towa Records area. Uzuki alludes to looking for 'something' while Kariya shrugs it off and tells her to relax. Upon encountering the protagonists, she storms off and drags Kariya with.
Unbeknownst to the protagonists, they also are in Udagawa, arriving shortly after Neku and Joshua do. Kariya immediately recognizes the symbol on the ground as a Taboo Noise refinery sigil and tells Uzuki to call up HQ: in lieu of promotions and glory, however, he says that he's got another mystery to unravel.
Day 4 comes, and Kariya wants to follow his instincts and investigate the aforementioned mystery: Neku and Joshua. GM's orders says it's hands off with the Players, so to get around it he's just going to play a little game. (“......And that’s different how?” “Details.”) Uzuki's in. So's a horde of Support Reapers.
The 'game' itself is basically Neku, Joshua, a lot of walls, and a lot of Support Reapers who the protagonists have to satisfy before they'll take down the walls. (Anticlimactically so: everyone involved wonders what the point is.) When asked, Kariya shrugs off the question...and with another Taboo Noise sighting proposes that they use the duo as bait, and maybe in the process learn something about the bait.
And so the duo's shadowed by Reapers. They're around to see Beat's attack on the duo and attempt to stop it, citing rules, though Kariya backs off with a shrug and a 'have fun' when Beat pulls out his special mission credentials. (Again, Uzuki's mileage sharply varies.) Kariya's also around to witness Joshua's up-until-that-point unprecedented display of power with eradicating a Taboo Noise, leading him to confront the two and ask...Joshua's alive, isn't he? Not that he's going to do much with it beyond simply knowing: in theory he could erase Joshua for being a rule-breaker, but the Taboo Noise was bothering them so he's just going to say that he blinked and leave erasing them for next time...and leave erasing them to Uzuki. And he's gone.
Day 6, Taboo Noise are swarming everywhere and the two are being relentlessly attacked like everything else spiritual in Shibuya. They're in a bind, saved by Neku and Joshua (who saves them precisely because they'll hate it): Uzuki rages, Kariya thanks them, because that's what you do when someone helps you out. She stomps off, he wonders...two simple words. Is it that hard?
Week 3
By now, even Uzuki has lost her eagerness to rack up points, mainly because the third week's treading on 'the grey area juuust short of black.' Barely legal, as there's only one player, Neku. But hey, they're Harrier Reapers and there's a player: they might as well go harry.
They're just in time to see Neku, surrounded by Noise: a gleeful Uzuki starts a countdown to erasure, letting Kariya know that he owes her ramen. (To which he replies, “Yes, ma’am. Just pay attention. “This” isn’t done yet.”) But everything's derailed with the timely arrival of Beat, who had become a Reaper in Week 1: he makes a pact with Neku and they run, and Kariya keeps Uzuki from chasing after them, telling her that she needs to report to the brass and that she'll enjoy the game if she takes it slow.
As a result, the Emergency Call's put out all across Shibuya.
Day 2, they (along with the other Reapers) are given O-Pins which remind them of the pins sweeping across town, and something about the entire situation strikes Kariya as off. Wrong. Suspicious. (But they put them on anyway: GM's rules.) Any more talk along those lines is derailed by the appearance of the GM for this week, the “Iron Maiden” Mitsuki Konishi, who appears personally to give them their orders for the week. She tempts Uzuki with a promotion, and then alludes to Kariya who should've already been...he changes the subject.
Day 3 and Uzuki's up to bat as temporary GM. After Neku and Beat whip her, first at tag and then in a fight, Kariya shows up, stage left, to calm things down. Out comes the revelation that Kariya could've been an officer but turned the promotion down, out comes him basically admitting that he likes his life as it currently is. Why go for a promotion? It's only a drag.
Day 4, and Kariya's up. He arranged for the two to be surrounded by walls, their wall-breaking keypins in puzzleboxes which (in turn) require a certain arrangement of Noise surrounding the two to be defeated before they'd open up. He ends up encountering Neku and Beat at Towa Records, and after a long fight is defeated. He's ready to give up and give a pin (which is in actuality Rhyme, Beat's sister, erased in the first week) when Uzuki shows up and insists on a second round.
Defeated again, Kariya tosses the pin to Beat...who instantly recognizes it as a fake. News to the Reapers, although Kariya immediately states, “Damn! I KNEW I couldn’t trust her. Hoodwinked again!” And then he adds that it was all a lie: the pin, Konishi's talk of promotions...they were just used to stall the two Players for time. Kariya ends up giving the Players a Lv. 4 keypin instead, the keypin they need to break down the strongest of the walls in the UG, acknowledging that it didn't make up for them being stalled.
Beat and Neku, after warning the two to watch their backs, leave.
The scene cuts to them on a familiar rooftop, Kariya sighing about being used, and Uzuki determined to rise up the ranks not so much for a promotion but so that they could change Shibuya and the Reaper's Game and make it a happier Shibuya for all Reapers. And Kariya's rising up with her. He decides to go with it...sounds like a good time. And it's got a nice ring to it. When asked as to why exactly he gave them the Lv. 4 keypin, Kariya states that he can tell that Shibuya's changing, simplifying, thoughts focusing on a single point. Any further talk of the ultimate plot is sadly derailed by the O-Pins that they were required to wear taking effect and them falling under the same brainwashing as the rest of the O-Pin wearing Shibuya populace.
Kariya's (and by extension, Uzuki) last appearance is as a brainwashed drone on Day 5. He and Uzuki attack Neku and Beat as they're leaving Udagawa, saying, “To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of true redemption, that this place may become as paradise. What a wonderful world such would be...”
They fight, again. The Reapers lose. As Kariya and Uzuki aren't ultimately erased by Beat and Neku, presumably once the Game was over they returned to their senses like the rest of Shibuya.
Personality:
Kariya Koki is rumored to possess high level abilities that would easily class him with the offers, skills which (according to Beat, at least) “...put the brass to shame. He’s only a small fry ‘cause he likes it that way.” He's also exceptionally cool-headed (almost to a fault), prefers to relax instead of exert effort, and seemingly without ambition...so the aforementioned skills generally don't come into play. Unlike some of the other Reapers, most notably his partner Yashiro Uzuki, he's comfortable with where he is in the Reaper food chain and what he does. As he explains, he declined a promotion once because, “Being an officer sucks. Why join the brass and strut around doin' nothing? Sounds like a total bore. I like the field, simple as that. You can feel the pulse out here. People's ideas conflicting, changing...I like bein' in the audience. I'm a stargazer.” He's a Harrier class Reaper by choice, in short, he likes the field and he likes being in Shibuya.
By contrast, his partner Uzuki is hot headed and ambitious, eager to finish assignments and rack up points and she's hungry for promotions...everything that he's not. Regardless, they get along. They're a team, being the only Reapers shown who have a light puck shared between each other, something that only players normally have. They balance each other out: Uzuki provides the drive and enthusiasm, while Kariya's cool head and general reluctance to exert effort keeps some of her more reckless impulses in check.
Near the end of the game, after discovering that they had been used by Konishi to stall Neku and Beat, Kariya was ready to shrug it off, "...face it, she just used us to stall for time. Kiss that promotion of yours goodbye." Uzuki's ambition, however, turned it around: instead of a negative, it's more of a sign that the two of them should instead claw their way up the ladder and make 'a happier Shibuya for all Reapers.' Without him, Uzuki would likely have lost her way at some point, burnt out or got erased: without her, Kariya would likely stagnate, chill in ramen shops and watch the Reaper's Game pass on by. As his (and her) Berserk Noise description states, flat out, they're two halves of a whole.
They're a team who kills time (usually at his instigation) by playing 'games' with things that range from erasing players to discovering the origin of the Taboo Noise and things in between, the loser buying the winner ramen...it's usually Uzuki who does the buying. He also spends time telling Uzuki about the old days of being a Reaper and implies that he knows a great deal more about the game than he lets on: he identified a Taboo Noise refinery signal on sight, was able to tell what was happening to Shibuya (though too late, as he and Uzuki fell under the influence of the O-pin), and could tell that there was something different about Joshua. Then again, it's hard to get a straight answer when Kariya doesn't feel like giving one. When Uzuki point blank asked him how long he was at it, given how Kariya brushed her and her two years of Reaperhood off and called her a spring chicken, he shrugged and replied with a meh. Details!
Abilities:
As a Reaper, Kariya is able to move between the RG and UG without people noticing...though in the RG, he's missing his wings, and thus can't use his powers. (For all intents and purposes he looks like a normal guy on the RG.) He is, like other Reapers, capable of creating Noise and erasing it. Like the players, he's able to make a pact and fight that way: he's also capable of projecting his shadow onto the alternate plane and circumvent needing a partner to fight, though he's weaker alone than he is with Uzuki.
In battle, Kariya fights with energy blasts and shoots shuriken. He's also capable of creating an electric barrier around him and countering close-range psyches that way.
Possessions:
A handful of Noise-generating pins (only good for the UG, alas) and a couple things of what's either bean paste or lollipops or bean paste flavored lollipops.
Sample:
((NOTE: I'll likely write up a new one when I get ready to send the app in, or at least edit this fucker to death. But for now, a sample.))
Kariya never liked Mondays. They represented a lot of things; they were the first day of the work week, the first day after the weekend. They were long and boring. Somehow, they just managed to ooze on by when all other days ran.
Not that he had to worry about Mondays anymore (not that Kariya did in the first place, but...details) but it was the principle behind it. Even if he was off, the rest of the city was on and you could feel the change. Like a long breath starting to be held until Friday, when it would be released in a long wistful sigh. Uzuki disagreed, but they always clashed when it came to work. That was one of the reasons he liked hanging around her so much.
Another was the free ramen he managed to get out of her on a regular basis...like today. It was just another way of keeping score, and a game had a way of distracting from the boring feeling that Monday always seemed to bring even long after he stopped being on the work week clock.
He was eating one such bowl of ramen, listening to her talk as he ate noodles in one long slurp: she was going on again about work, work, work. No games meant no points, no points meant no promotions, no promotions means no...what? They never got that far. Uzuki was starting to look like she was ready to pull out her gun and whack some folks in the RG and recruit for the Reaper’s Game that way...or something drastic.
And...swallow. “Whoa. Aight, easy, girl,” Kariya replied, casual, easy, practiced. It was like the two of them were reciting from a script: they had a rhythm. “Relax, this is our time off. ‘sides, stress out now and you’ll never make it through the week.”
Canon: The World Ends With You
History:
An undetermined amount of time prior to the start of The World Ends With You, Kariya died and played a round of the Reaper's Game. He presumably survived, but didn't win, and chose to become a Reaper. (Things might've happened slightly differently, but...details.)
Time passed. At some point he met Yashiro Uzuki and the two ended up partnering up, working together to erase Players during games and presumably spending time together when not...their banter wouldn't be so easy and their teamwork as seamless if it was otherwise.
Week 1
Kariya, and by extension Uzuki, appear early on: immediately after the opening finishes playing (while elsewhere, Neku runs from frogs while wondering what the heck's going on) they're shown standing on a rooftop. They banter and exposit...it's the first game in a while, first time for them in a long while to rack up points, and to liven things up the two of them might as well play a game: Reaper sport 3, a Player hunt. Loser buys the winner ramen.
Uzuki goes after the main characters while Kariya, presumably, erases Players off screen for the next few days.
Day 4 rolls around. The Players are lulled by a seemingly easy mission, which is when Uzuki and Kariya make their move and unleash a trap, resulting in erasing Rhyme. They then make their official introductions:
Neku: Reapers?
Kariya: Bingo! I’m Koki Kariya. And this is Uzuki Yashiro. There. Now that we’re all friends---
Beat: Hey! What did you do with Rhyme?
Uzuki: Um...hello? You just saw. She’s gone. Erased. Noise food. Game over.
Kariya: Her soul’s just another speck of Shibuya space dust.
They taunt Beat a bit more before leaving. Time passes.
Day 7 comes. As Neku and Shiki prepare to face the Game Master, Kariya and Uzuki are standing on a familiar rooftop, relaxing...Uzuki sighs about how boring Day 7 is for lack of players, and Kariya talks about how it's the first of many more days off...he hopes. They're interrupted by Beat, who wants answers. Uzuki's in favor of erasing him, but Kariya...eh, let Beat ask, maybe he'll answer.
Week 2
Week 2 starts much the same as the first. They're standing on a rooftop, Kariya sighing about work again while Uzuki's excited about the opportunity for extra points...which promptly gets derailed when they get the call and are told to wait on standby. (Sho Minamoto's GM this round, a guy who's excellent on most counts but fails when it comes to working with others.) Kariya doesn't mind, Uzuki's mileage varies.
Day 2 comes. Kariya's busy testing the walls, discovering that Minamoto was very thorough and very quick when it came to sealing off routes...rather slow when it came to telling the Reapers about the change. Ah, well, nothing too bad. (Uzuki's mileage, naturally, varies.) They start to engage in their usual banter, when they're interrupted by what Kariya identifies as Taboo Noise: a special form of Noise which targets everything, Reapers included. Uzuki bothers HQ, and Kariya...ponders.
The next day they're spotted in the Towa Records area. Uzuki alludes to looking for 'something' while Kariya shrugs it off and tells her to relax. Upon encountering the protagonists, she storms off and drags Kariya with.
Unbeknownst to the protagonists, they also are in Udagawa, arriving shortly after Neku and Joshua do. Kariya immediately recognizes the symbol on the ground as a Taboo Noise refinery sigil and tells Uzuki to call up HQ: in lieu of promotions and glory, however, he says that he's got another mystery to unravel.
Day 4 comes, and Kariya wants to follow his instincts and investigate the aforementioned mystery: Neku and Joshua. GM's orders says it's hands off with the Players, so to get around it he's just going to play a little game. (“......And that’s different how?” “Details.”) Uzuki's in. So's a horde of Support Reapers.
The 'game' itself is basically Neku, Joshua, a lot of walls, and a lot of Support Reapers who the protagonists have to satisfy before they'll take down the walls. (Anticlimactically so: everyone involved wonders what the point is.) When asked, Kariya shrugs off the question...and with another Taboo Noise sighting proposes that they use the duo as bait, and maybe in the process learn something about the bait.
And so the duo's shadowed by Reapers. They're around to see Beat's attack on the duo and attempt to stop it, citing rules, though Kariya backs off with a shrug and a 'have fun' when Beat pulls out his special mission credentials. (Again, Uzuki's mileage sharply varies.) Kariya's also around to witness Joshua's up-until-that-point unprecedented display of power with eradicating a Taboo Noise, leading him to confront the two and ask...Joshua's alive, isn't he? Not that he's going to do much with it beyond simply knowing: in theory he could erase Joshua for being a rule-breaker, but the Taboo Noise was bothering them so he's just going to say that he blinked and leave erasing them for next time...and leave erasing them to Uzuki. And he's gone.
Day 6, Taboo Noise are swarming everywhere and the two are being relentlessly attacked like everything else spiritual in Shibuya. They're in a bind, saved by Neku and Joshua (who saves them precisely because they'll hate it): Uzuki rages, Kariya thanks them, because that's what you do when someone helps you out. She stomps off, he wonders...two simple words. Is it that hard?
Week 3
By now, even Uzuki has lost her eagerness to rack up points, mainly because the third week's treading on 'the grey area juuust short of black.' Barely legal, as there's only one player, Neku. But hey, they're Harrier Reapers and there's a player: they might as well go harry.
They're just in time to see Neku, surrounded by Noise: a gleeful Uzuki starts a countdown to erasure, letting Kariya know that he owes her ramen. (To which he replies, “Yes, ma’am. Just pay attention. “This” isn’t done yet.”) But everything's derailed with the timely arrival of Beat, who had become a Reaper in Week 1: he makes a pact with Neku and they run, and Kariya keeps Uzuki from chasing after them, telling her that she needs to report to the brass and that she'll enjoy the game if she takes it slow.
As a result, the Emergency Call's put out all across Shibuya.
Day 2, they (along with the other Reapers) are given O-Pins which remind them of the pins sweeping across town, and something about the entire situation strikes Kariya as off. Wrong. Suspicious. (But they put them on anyway: GM's rules.) Any more talk along those lines is derailed by the appearance of the GM for this week, the “Iron Maiden” Mitsuki Konishi, who appears personally to give them their orders for the week. She tempts Uzuki with a promotion, and then alludes to Kariya who should've already been...he changes the subject.
Day 3 and Uzuki's up to bat as temporary GM. After Neku and Beat whip her, first at tag and then in a fight, Kariya shows up, stage left, to calm things down. Out comes the revelation that Kariya could've been an officer but turned the promotion down, out comes him basically admitting that he likes his life as it currently is. Why go for a promotion? It's only a drag.
Day 4, and Kariya's up. He arranged for the two to be surrounded by walls, their wall-breaking keypins in puzzleboxes which (in turn) require a certain arrangement of Noise surrounding the two to be defeated before they'd open up. He ends up encountering Neku and Beat at Towa Records, and after a long fight is defeated. He's ready to give up and give a pin (which is in actuality Rhyme, Beat's sister, erased in the first week) when Uzuki shows up and insists on a second round.
Defeated again, Kariya tosses the pin to Beat...who instantly recognizes it as a fake. News to the Reapers, although Kariya immediately states, “Damn! I KNEW I couldn’t trust her. Hoodwinked again!” And then he adds that it was all a lie: the pin, Konishi's talk of promotions...they were just used to stall the two Players for time. Kariya ends up giving the Players a Lv. 4 keypin instead, the keypin they need to break down the strongest of the walls in the UG, acknowledging that it didn't make up for them being stalled.
Beat and Neku, after warning the two to watch their backs, leave.
The scene cuts to them on a familiar rooftop, Kariya sighing about being used, and Uzuki determined to rise up the ranks not so much for a promotion but so that they could change Shibuya and the Reaper's Game and make it a happier Shibuya for all Reapers. And Kariya's rising up with her. He decides to go with it...sounds like a good time. And it's got a nice ring to it. When asked as to why exactly he gave them the Lv. 4 keypin, Kariya states that he can tell that Shibuya's changing, simplifying, thoughts focusing on a single point. Any further talk of the ultimate plot is sadly derailed by the O-Pins that they were required to wear taking effect and them falling under the same brainwashing as the rest of the O-Pin wearing Shibuya populace.
Kariya's (and by extension, Uzuki) last appearance is as a brainwashed drone on Day 5. He and Uzuki attack Neku and Beat as they're leaving Udagawa, saying, “To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of true redemption, that this place may become as paradise. What a wonderful world such would be...”
They fight, again. The Reapers lose. As Kariya and Uzuki aren't ultimately erased by Beat and Neku, presumably once the Game was over they returned to their senses like the rest of Shibuya.
Personality:
Kariya Koki is rumored to possess high level abilities that would easily class him with the offers, skills which (according to Beat, at least) “...put the brass to shame. He’s only a small fry ‘cause he likes it that way.” He's also exceptionally cool-headed (almost to a fault), prefers to relax instead of exert effort, and seemingly without ambition...so the aforementioned skills generally don't come into play. Unlike some of the other Reapers, most notably his partner Yashiro Uzuki, he's comfortable with where he is in the Reaper food chain and what he does. As he explains, he declined a promotion once because, “Being an officer sucks. Why join the brass and strut around doin' nothing? Sounds like a total bore. I like the field, simple as that. You can feel the pulse out here. People's ideas conflicting, changing...I like bein' in the audience. I'm a stargazer.” He's a Harrier class Reaper by choice, in short, he likes the field and he likes being in Shibuya.
By contrast, his partner Uzuki is hot headed and ambitious, eager to finish assignments and rack up points and she's hungry for promotions...everything that he's not. Regardless, they get along. They're a team, being the only Reapers shown who have a light puck shared between each other, something that only players normally have. They balance each other out: Uzuki provides the drive and enthusiasm, while Kariya's cool head and general reluctance to exert effort keeps some of her more reckless impulses in check.
Near the end of the game, after discovering that they had been used by Konishi to stall Neku and Beat, Kariya was ready to shrug it off, "...face it, she just used us to stall for time. Kiss that promotion of yours goodbye." Uzuki's ambition, however, turned it around: instead of a negative, it's more of a sign that the two of them should instead claw their way up the ladder and make 'a happier Shibuya for all Reapers.' Without him, Uzuki would likely have lost her way at some point, burnt out or got erased: without her, Kariya would likely stagnate, chill in ramen shops and watch the Reaper's Game pass on by. As his (and her) Berserk Noise description states, flat out, they're two halves of a whole.
They're a team who kills time (usually at his instigation) by playing 'games' with things that range from erasing players to discovering the origin of the Taboo Noise and things in between, the loser buying the winner ramen...it's usually Uzuki who does the buying. He also spends time telling Uzuki about the old days of being a Reaper and implies that he knows a great deal more about the game than he lets on: he identified a Taboo Noise refinery signal on sight, was able to tell what was happening to Shibuya (though too late, as he and Uzuki fell under the influence of the O-pin), and could tell that there was something different about Joshua. Then again, it's hard to get a straight answer when Kariya doesn't feel like giving one. When Uzuki point blank asked him how long he was at it, given how Kariya brushed her and her two years of Reaperhood off and called her a spring chicken, he shrugged and replied with a meh. Details!
Abilities:
As a Reaper, Kariya is able to move between the RG and UG without people noticing...though in the RG, he's missing his wings, and thus can't use his powers. (For all intents and purposes he looks like a normal guy on the RG.) He is, like other Reapers, capable of creating Noise and erasing it. Like the players, he's able to make a pact and fight that way: he's also capable of projecting his shadow onto the alternate plane and circumvent needing a partner to fight, though he's weaker alone than he is with Uzuki.
In battle, Kariya fights with energy blasts and shoots shuriken. He's also capable of creating an electric barrier around him and countering close-range psyches that way.
Possessions:
A handful of Noise-generating pins (only good for the UG, alas) and a couple things of what's either bean paste or lollipops or bean paste flavored lollipops.
Sample:
((NOTE: I'll likely write up a new one when I get ready to send the app in, or at least edit this fucker to death. But for now, a sample.))
Kariya never liked Mondays. They represented a lot of things; they were the first day of the work week, the first day after the weekend. They were long and boring. Somehow, they just managed to ooze on by when all other days ran.
Not that he had to worry about Mondays anymore (not that Kariya did in the first place, but...details) but it was the principle behind it. Even if he was off, the rest of the city was on and you could feel the change. Like a long breath starting to be held until Friday, when it would be released in a long wistful sigh. Uzuki disagreed, but they always clashed when it came to work. That was one of the reasons he liked hanging around her so much.
Another was the free ramen he managed to get out of her on a regular basis...like today. It was just another way of keeping score, and a game had a way of distracting from the boring feeling that Monday always seemed to bring even long after he stopped being on the work week clock.
He was eating one such bowl of ramen, listening to her talk as he ate noodles in one long slurp: she was going on again about work, work, work. No games meant no points, no points meant no promotions, no promotions means no...what? They never got that far. Uzuki was starting to look like she was ready to pull out her gun and whack some folks in the RG and recruit for the Reaper’s Game that way...or something drastic.
And...swallow. “Whoa. Aight, easy, girl,” Kariya replied, casual, easy, practiced. It was like the two of them were reciting from a script: they had a rhythm. “Relax, this is our time off. ‘sides, stress out now and you’ll never make it through the week.”