Sion | No.6 - History section
Like everyone else in the city, Sion was born and raised in No.6. His father kicked out by his mother because of his disgusting behavior of picking up woman and spending his money on alcohol. Sion entered one of the most elite curriculums and majoring under ecology, people expected great things from him. But unlike the majority of the population, Sion desired for change, something out of the norm.
It was on his twelfth birthday when Sion got what he desperately wanted. A hurricane stormed through the city of No.6. And so he opened his window, despite his mother’s warnings, and stepped outside into the storm itself then began to yell. His voice could not be heard because of the winds and rain but he continued to scream until the control system in his room gave him the warning that it was about to shut the window and dry the room.
Instead of letting the system shut the window, he went back inside to shut it off. After shutting it off, so the window wouldn’t close, he heard a faint laugh and turned to see a boy with shoulder length, dark hair standing in his room next to the open window. As he looked the boy’s girlish figure over, he spotted the wound on his arm but as he reached out to touch the boy, he was shoved back against the wall with fingers wrapped around his throat. He told Sion not to move but he wasn’t afraid. Before replying back, he stared at the other boy’s gray eyes then calmly spoke, telling him he would treat the wound on his arm.
The other slowly loosened his grip on Sion’s neck but they quickly went back to gripping it just like before when his mother’s voice came through the intercom. Calmly and silently, he reassured the intruder before speaking to his mother who noticed he had opened his window. He told her he would shut it and told her not to bother him because of a ‘report’ he had to write for class. The moment their conversation ended, the boy let go of his throat and leaned against the bed. Sion quickly realized how bad his state was and shut the window before grabbing the first aid kit.
As he tore the sleeve off his shirt so he could clean the wound, to his surprise he noticed it was a bullet wound. Through a short conversation, Sion explained that he specialized in ecology and was starting a gifted curriculum in school. The subject quickly changed once Sion pulled a syringe to numb his arm so he could stitch the wound. It frightened the boy that he would try such a thing outside of a hospital, but Sion claimed it was all he had and it was better than nothing.
Before applying the anesthetic, he asked the other if someone in the hunting club may have accidently shot him, which the other replied while smiling, saying that it had been a manhunt. Sion didn’t understand but he was quickly brought back to the matter at hand and eagerly, but nervously, applied the anesthetic around the wound. They exchanged names before Sion began to carefully stitch the wound. After the deed had been done, Nezumi changed into dry clothes and drank the hot chocolate offered to him by Sion. Through short conversation, Sion explained, or rather lied, about why he had let Nezumi inside instead of sounding the alarm.
Sion then went downstairs to see his mother, noticing the area had been put under lock down, not just because of the hurricane, but also because a criminal had escaped and was last seen in their area. It was Nezumi. His face appeared on the TV screen as well as the numbers on the VC (aka violence chip) that was inside him. Despite what he had just found out, he calmly ate the cherry cake given to him by his mother. It was something she made for him every year on his birthday.
His mother decided to leave the security system off despite the warning she had just seen on TV and before long, Sion made his way back upstairs as his mother began to catch on to his strange behavior. Once he entered his room, Nezumi told him to keep the light off which caused him to struggle in getting over to his bed. He handed the other boy a slice of the cake he had gotten and told him what he had seen on the TV, which startled Nezumi for a moment though it was replaced with amusement as Sion expressed his worry about him and if he could make it out of the city safely.
With Sion questioning him, Nezumi then explained how he had gotten into the city though he refused to go into greater detail despite Sion’s efforts to get him to spill everything. He was only shut up when the boy mentioned that he had seen him screaming into the rain and promised to not tell anyone. In an attempt to quiet Nezumi, he lunged at him, only ending up on the bed instead of the other boy. In a split second, Nezumi had spun around, grabbed Sion’s arms with one hand to pin them down, squeezed his legs against Sion’s hips, causing his legs to go numb and pressed a spoon to his throat like a knife.
Amazed by what happened, he stared at Nezumi with a smile and asked how he could do such a thing so easily. The boy just laughed and laid on top of Sion, who quickly realized after touching the bare skin of his back, that he had a fever. But instead of letting him take care of him, he fell asleep and Sion soon followed. When Sion awoke, he quickly realized that his guest was gone.
Only an hour after Sion had realized Nezumi left, the Safety Bureau came to his house. A police officer then proceeded to question Sion about Nezumi and as he answered, he didn’t lie about what he had done to help the other boy. So as punishment for aiding a VC, all awards were taken from him so he was no longer allowed to enter the gifted curriculum. He and his mother were also thrown out into the streets as the lowest ranking citizens because of what Sion had done. Out of school, Sion then began to work at the Park Administration Office to help maintain the cleaning robots that patrolled the park. It was only when four years after his last encounter with Nezumi did his life take another turn.
It began when Sampo, discovered a body, or an ‘indistinguishable object’ as the robot put it. After seeing leg of this body on the monitor, Yamase, Sion’s co-worker, and he quickly rode their bikes to the park. As Sampo had detected, there were no signs of life, but what had surprised Sion even more was that rigor mortis had already set in and the smell of rot was already beginning to come from him. Though a strange blackish green mark caught his eye, he was forced to leave the scene because the Safety Bureau took over. After the incident, Sion met up with Safu, his childhood friend, and together they discussed what Sion had seen in disbelief. Quickly going off topic, she then began to question why Sion didn’t continue attending the elite school but he refused to answer because he believed she wouldn’t understand why he had helped a VC.
Together they walked to the station so Safu could go home and she asked him if he was jealous of her studying abroad but they were quickly stopped by an officer from the bureau who demanded to see their ID cards. It was only because Safu was in the gifted curriculum that they were able to quickly walk away after the man had scanned their cards. Calling him a liar afterwards, Safu explained to Sion how if he had really been jealous about her studying abroad, he would have expressed things differently. Sion only brushed it aside and continued to say he was jealous, even though he truly wasn’t.
After Safu had told Sion when she was going to leave on her trip, to his complete surprise, Safu asked for his sperm so they could have a ‘perfect’ child together then quickly changed her demand to just wanting to have sex with him after a small argument over genetics. Turning down her offer, he explained that he only saw her as a friend but was willing to try it when she came back in two years if she still wanted to have sex. Calling him an idiot, she started to walk away when a mouse darted past her and climbed up to sit on Sion’s shoulder, which caused her to shriek.
The gray mouse leaned close to Sion’s ear and spoke in a voice all too familiar to him; Nezumi. But as Sion tried to grab the mouse, it ran towards the Lost City and in the crowd he spotted two familiar gray eyes for a split second and so he decided to chase after who he had hoped to be Nezumi but was unable to find him. So he went home to his mother, Karan, in the bakery his mother ran in the Lost City. He lied and explained to her what had happened at the park, instead of telling the truth about seeing Nezumi, because of the dazed face he was accused of having.
Safu called once Sion was up in his room, telling him that she knew this Nezumi person was important to him but she still loved him more than anyone. After she hung up, he called out to Nezumi in the dark but no one responded, so he went to sleep.
As another day passed, Sion went into work and reluctantly recited the pledge they were forced to say every morning to show their loyalty to the city of No.6. As he entered the control room, a young woman exited and Sion questioned if it was Yamase’s girlfriend when he then corrected Sion in saying it was the wife of the thirty one year old man who had died in the park, which in turn, shocked Sion. What upset him more was when his co-worker said the bureau had deemed it an accident, making Sion call it bullshit.
Instead of letting the conversation go any further, Yamase got up to get coffee for the both of them and as he did, he told Sion about how he had modified dead bodies to make the person look happy. Sion then accused the bureau of doing something when Yamase scolded him and told him to get back to work. Before they were able to return to their normal work, Sion’s co-worker began to rapidly age, Sion watching in horror. It only took a matter of minutes before the man went still, rigor mortis quickly kicking in like the man from yesterday. Sion observed the body before him, memorizing what he had seen and was still seeing when a blackish green spot appeared at the base of Yamase’s neck. Even as Sampo’s buzzer went off, Sion ignored it and watched as a bee ate its way out of his friend’s neck then fainted from shock.
When he awoke, Rashi, the same man that had interrogated Sion when he was a child, was there to help investigate the crime scene. Like before, he explained everything to the man but he didn’t believe anything he had said. Instead, he became suspicious of Sion because he had studied ecology and knew of organisms and their environments. Sion decided to ignore Rashi and help Sampo, who displayed an error on the monitor but as he minimized it, a gray mouse was visible on the robots arm. Nezumi spoke through the mouse, telling him to get out because he was in trouble. Pressing a button, he allowed Nezumi to listen to their conversation and reassured he would come to rescue Sion before he was dragged away.
Once in the car, he quickly noticed their destination was not the security bureau, but the Correctional facility because he had become the top suspect in Yamase and the man’s death. Teasing Sion, they drove past his mother’s bakery so he could see her for the last time. As they left the Lost City and entered the western border, the car came to a stop because, one of the robots Sion had helped control and maintain, Sampo, sat in the middle of the road. To inspect the cleaning robot, Rashi got out of the car but the moment he approached it, Sampo clung to the man and dragged him down to the ground while two mice snuck into the car along with a hooded man. Threatening the officers with the bomb-mice, they took the hand cuffs off Sion and got out of the car.
Though Sion quickly indentified the man as Nezumi, Nezumi ignored his questions and tossed him a security blanket, explaining he was going to crash the car. Because the car was being remotely controlled, Nezumi was forced to set off a small bomb in the car for them to jump out the car and roll onto the ground. Throwing away the ID card that held all of Sion’s information; they made a run for it into the forest and made it to a car where Ippo, another cleaning robot Sion took care of, sat in the back of the truck.
Driving towards the silver gates, Sion questioned how Nezumi had known he was in trouble and if he had been keeping an eye on him. Nezumi forced Sion to get out of the truck after Sion told him he couldn’t move in such a confused state. The truck was then set to auto pilot and sent back to the Park Administration office with Ippo while the two quickly made their way into the waste disposal plant though an explosion went off at the gate. Nezumi didn’t give Sion time to feel bad for the robots for long as he grabbed his wrist and made a run down to an area that held wastewater. He then handed a pair of goggles and without complaining, Sion put them on and they both dove into the water.
After they both resurfaced, Sion quickly realized they had been brought to the western district, where No.6 drained the sewage to at times. Before Nezumi was able to lead Sion to his home, Sion scratched at the back of his neck, only to feel a blister at the base of it. Instead of worrying about it too much, they moved on to Nezumi’s house which ended up being one of the rooms in a barracks. Meeting three mice, he read Macbeth to them before taking his own shower after Nezumi. But as he got out, and after a short argument, black spots began to appear on his arms and he screamed in pain, begging Nezumi to cut open the blister on his neck.
Being laid down onto the bed, Sion slowly drifted into unconsciousness until Nezumi poured a warm liquid down his throat to keep him awake as he cut open the blister Sion had told him about. He continued to slowly fall into unconsciousness, only to have Nezumi wake him up any way he possibly could, even after he finished removed what was inside the blister. He then begged for water, which was given to him until Nezumi deemed him okay and let him fall asleep.
As he slept, he dreamt Yamase grabbed his ankle and his skin slowly began to rot and fall off the bone until he reached out and grabbed Nezumi’s hand which pulled him out of his sleep. Getting another drink of water, he thanked Nezumi for saving him for the second time then told him about his dream. Realizing he was still too weak to get up and that his chest was tightly bandaged, he laid back down to sleep as Nezumi went out. When he woke, Nezumi was still gone so he decided to step outside and as two children saw him, they shouted ‘snake’ and ran away, confusing Sion. As he ran his fingers through his hair out of frustration, he noticed the strands of hair caught in his fingers were white. To get a better look, he went back to Nezumi’s room and found a mirror, only to stare at the red ‘snake’ that wrapped around his neck and ended under his left eye.
He then tore the bandages off his torso and stared in horror as he noticed the mark circled around his torso, crotch then entwined itself down his left leg like a snake. Nezumi came in at that moment and asked Sion if he regretted living, which he replied, while crying, that he didn’t and that he wanted to live. Quickly recovering from the shock, Sion got dressed and helped Nezumi make soup.
After their meal, Nezumi then decided to show Sion what he had picked out of his blister, saying it was right up Sion’s field. To his surprise it was a pupa along with an egg that it had eaten its way out of though it failed to grow any further. He deducted the bee itself was parasitic, telling Nezumi that there were more than 200,000 different kinds of parasitic wasps. After a short conversation about where it may have come from, Nezumi began to laugh, which in turn worried Sion and so he poured a bucket of water on his head. He told Sion he thought it was funny that No.6 had a man eating wasp, angering Sion only for a moment. Talking about the day they met afterwards, he showed Sion one of the mice, explaining how it was a robot and how it kept an eye on him for four years.
It was on his twelfth birthday when Sion got what he desperately wanted. A hurricane stormed through the city of No.6. And so he opened his window, despite his mother’s warnings, and stepped outside into the storm itself then began to yell. His voice could not be heard because of the winds and rain but he continued to scream until the control system in his room gave him the warning that it was about to shut the window and dry the room.
Instead of letting the system shut the window, he went back inside to shut it off. After shutting it off, so the window wouldn’t close, he heard a faint laugh and turned to see a boy with shoulder length, dark hair standing in his room next to the open window. As he looked the boy’s girlish figure over, he spotted the wound on his arm but as he reached out to touch the boy, he was shoved back against the wall with fingers wrapped around his throat. He told Sion not to move but he wasn’t afraid. Before replying back, he stared at the other boy’s gray eyes then calmly spoke, telling him he would treat the wound on his arm.
The other slowly loosened his grip on Sion’s neck but they quickly went back to gripping it just like before when his mother’s voice came through the intercom. Calmly and silently, he reassured the intruder before speaking to his mother who noticed he had opened his window. He told her he would shut it and told her not to bother him because of a ‘report’ he had to write for class. The moment their conversation ended, the boy let go of his throat and leaned against the bed. Sion quickly realized how bad his state was and shut the window before grabbing the first aid kit.
As he tore the sleeve off his shirt so he could clean the wound, to his surprise he noticed it was a bullet wound. Through a short conversation, Sion explained that he specialized in ecology and was starting a gifted curriculum in school. The subject quickly changed once Sion pulled a syringe to numb his arm so he could stitch the wound. It frightened the boy that he would try such a thing outside of a hospital, but Sion claimed it was all he had and it was better than nothing.
Before applying the anesthetic, he asked the other if someone in the hunting club may have accidently shot him, which the other replied while smiling, saying that it had been a manhunt. Sion didn’t understand but he was quickly brought back to the matter at hand and eagerly, but nervously, applied the anesthetic around the wound. They exchanged names before Sion began to carefully stitch the wound. After the deed had been done, Nezumi changed into dry clothes and drank the hot chocolate offered to him by Sion. Through short conversation, Sion explained, or rather lied, about why he had let Nezumi inside instead of sounding the alarm.
Sion then went downstairs to see his mother, noticing the area had been put under lock down, not just because of the hurricane, but also because a criminal had escaped and was last seen in their area. It was Nezumi. His face appeared on the TV screen as well as the numbers on the VC (aka violence chip) that was inside him. Despite what he had just found out, he calmly ate the cherry cake given to him by his mother. It was something she made for him every year on his birthday.
His mother decided to leave the security system off despite the warning she had just seen on TV and before long, Sion made his way back upstairs as his mother began to catch on to his strange behavior. Once he entered his room, Nezumi told him to keep the light off which caused him to struggle in getting over to his bed. He handed the other boy a slice of the cake he had gotten and told him what he had seen on the TV, which startled Nezumi for a moment though it was replaced with amusement as Sion expressed his worry about him and if he could make it out of the city safely.
With Sion questioning him, Nezumi then explained how he had gotten into the city though he refused to go into greater detail despite Sion’s efforts to get him to spill everything. He was only shut up when the boy mentioned that he had seen him screaming into the rain and promised to not tell anyone. In an attempt to quiet Nezumi, he lunged at him, only ending up on the bed instead of the other boy. In a split second, Nezumi had spun around, grabbed Sion’s arms with one hand to pin them down, squeezed his legs against Sion’s hips, causing his legs to go numb and pressed a spoon to his throat like a knife.
Amazed by what happened, he stared at Nezumi with a smile and asked how he could do such a thing so easily. The boy just laughed and laid on top of Sion, who quickly realized after touching the bare skin of his back, that he had a fever. But instead of letting him take care of him, he fell asleep and Sion soon followed. When Sion awoke, he quickly realized that his guest was gone.
Only an hour after Sion had realized Nezumi left, the Safety Bureau came to his house. A police officer then proceeded to question Sion about Nezumi and as he answered, he didn’t lie about what he had done to help the other boy. So as punishment for aiding a VC, all awards were taken from him so he was no longer allowed to enter the gifted curriculum. He and his mother were also thrown out into the streets as the lowest ranking citizens because of what Sion had done. Out of school, Sion then began to work at the Park Administration Office to help maintain the cleaning robots that patrolled the park. It was only when four years after his last encounter with Nezumi did his life take another turn.
It began when Sampo, discovered a body, or an ‘indistinguishable object’ as the robot put it. After seeing leg of this body on the monitor, Yamase, Sion’s co-worker, and he quickly rode their bikes to the park. As Sampo had detected, there were no signs of life, but what had surprised Sion even more was that rigor mortis had already set in and the smell of rot was already beginning to come from him. Though a strange blackish green mark caught his eye, he was forced to leave the scene because the Safety Bureau took over. After the incident, Sion met up with Safu, his childhood friend, and together they discussed what Sion had seen in disbelief. Quickly going off topic, she then began to question why Sion didn’t continue attending the elite school but he refused to answer because he believed she wouldn’t understand why he had helped a VC.
Together they walked to the station so Safu could go home and she asked him if he was jealous of her studying abroad but they were quickly stopped by an officer from the bureau who demanded to see their ID cards. It was only because Safu was in the gifted curriculum that they were able to quickly walk away after the man had scanned their cards. Calling him a liar afterwards, Safu explained to Sion how if he had really been jealous about her studying abroad, he would have expressed things differently. Sion only brushed it aside and continued to say he was jealous, even though he truly wasn’t.
After Safu had told Sion when she was going to leave on her trip, to his complete surprise, Safu asked for his sperm so they could have a ‘perfect’ child together then quickly changed her demand to just wanting to have sex with him after a small argument over genetics. Turning down her offer, he explained that he only saw her as a friend but was willing to try it when she came back in two years if she still wanted to have sex. Calling him an idiot, she started to walk away when a mouse darted past her and climbed up to sit on Sion’s shoulder, which caused her to shriek.
The gray mouse leaned close to Sion’s ear and spoke in a voice all too familiar to him; Nezumi. But as Sion tried to grab the mouse, it ran towards the Lost City and in the crowd he spotted two familiar gray eyes for a split second and so he decided to chase after who he had hoped to be Nezumi but was unable to find him. So he went home to his mother, Karan, in the bakery his mother ran in the Lost City. He lied and explained to her what had happened at the park, instead of telling the truth about seeing Nezumi, because of the dazed face he was accused of having.
Safu called once Sion was up in his room, telling him that she knew this Nezumi person was important to him but she still loved him more than anyone. After she hung up, he called out to Nezumi in the dark but no one responded, so he went to sleep.
As another day passed, Sion went into work and reluctantly recited the pledge they were forced to say every morning to show their loyalty to the city of No.6. As he entered the control room, a young woman exited and Sion questioned if it was Yamase’s girlfriend when he then corrected Sion in saying it was the wife of the thirty one year old man who had died in the park, which in turn, shocked Sion. What upset him more was when his co-worker said the bureau had deemed it an accident, making Sion call it bullshit.
Instead of letting the conversation go any further, Yamase got up to get coffee for the both of them and as he did, he told Sion about how he had modified dead bodies to make the person look happy. Sion then accused the bureau of doing something when Yamase scolded him and told him to get back to work. Before they were able to return to their normal work, Sion’s co-worker began to rapidly age, Sion watching in horror. It only took a matter of minutes before the man went still, rigor mortis quickly kicking in like the man from yesterday. Sion observed the body before him, memorizing what he had seen and was still seeing when a blackish green spot appeared at the base of Yamase’s neck. Even as Sampo’s buzzer went off, Sion ignored it and watched as a bee ate its way out of his friend’s neck then fainted from shock.
When he awoke, Rashi, the same man that had interrogated Sion when he was a child, was there to help investigate the crime scene. Like before, he explained everything to the man but he didn’t believe anything he had said. Instead, he became suspicious of Sion because he had studied ecology and knew of organisms and their environments. Sion decided to ignore Rashi and help Sampo, who displayed an error on the monitor but as he minimized it, a gray mouse was visible on the robots arm. Nezumi spoke through the mouse, telling him to get out because he was in trouble. Pressing a button, he allowed Nezumi to listen to their conversation and reassured he would come to rescue Sion before he was dragged away.
Once in the car, he quickly noticed their destination was not the security bureau, but the Correctional facility because he had become the top suspect in Yamase and the man’s death. Teasing Sion, they drove past his mother’s bakery so he could see her for the last time. As they left the Lost City and entered the western border, the car came to a stop because, one of the robots Sion had helped control and maintain, Sampo, sat in the middle of the road. To inspect the cleaning robot, Rashi got out of the car but the moment he approached it, Sampo clung to the man and dragged him down to the ground while two mice snuck into the car along with a hooded man. Threatening the officers with the bomb-mice, they took the hand cuffs off Sion and got out of the car.
Though Sion quickly indentified the man as Nezumi, Nezumi ignored his questions and tossed him a security blanket, explaining he was going to crash the car. Because the car was being remotely controlled, Nezumi was forced to set off a small bomb in the car for them to jump out the car and roll onto the ground. Throwing away the ID card that held all of Sion’s information; they made a run for it into the forest and made it to a car where Ippo, another cleaning robot Sion took care of, sat in the back of the truck.
Driving towards the silver gates, Sion questioned how Nezumi had known he was in trouble and if he had been keeping an eye on him. Nezumi forced Sion to get out of the truck after Sion told him he couldn’t move in such a confused state. The truck was then set to auto pilot and sent back to the Park Administration office with Ippo while the two quickly made their way into the waste disposal plant though an explosion went off at the gate. Nezumi didn’t give Sion time to feel bad for the robots for long as he grabbed his wrist and made a run down to an area that held wastewater. He then handed a pair of goggles and without complaining, Sion put them on and they both dove into the water.
After they both resurfaced, Sion quickly realized they had been brought to the western district, where No.6 drained the sewage to at times. Before Nezumi was able to lead Sion to his home, Sion scratched at the back of his neck, only to feel a blister at the base of it. Instead of worrying about it too much, they moved on to Nezumi’s house which ended up being one of the rooms in a barracks. Meeting three mice, he read Macbeth to them before taking his own shower after Nezumi. But as he got out, and after a short argument, black spots began to appear on his arms and he screamed in pain, begging Nezumi to cut open the blister on his neck.
Being laid down onto the bed, Sion slowly drifted into unconsciousness until Nezumi poured a warm liquid down his throat to keep him awake as he cut open the blister Sion had told him about. He continued to slowly fall into unconsciousness, only to have Nezumi wake him up any way he possibly could, even after he finished removed what was inside the blister. He then begged for water, which was given to him until Nezumi deemed him okay and let him fall asleep.
As he slept, he dreamt Yamase grabbed his ankle and his skin slowly began to rot and fall off the bone until he reached out and grabbed Nezumi’s hand which pulled him out of his sleep. Getting another drink of water, he thanked Nezumi for saving him for the second time then told him about his dream. Realizing he was still too weak to get up and that his chest was tightly bandaged, he laid back down to sleep as Nezumi went out. When he woke, Nezumi was still gone so he decided to step outside and as two children saw him, they shouted ‘snake’ and ran away, confusing Sion. As he ran his fingers through his hair out of frustration, he noticed the strands of hair caught in his fingers were white. To get a better look, he went back to Nezumi’s room and found a mirror, only to stare at the red ‘snake’ that wrapped around his neck and ended under his left eye.
He then tore the bandages off his torso and stared in horror as he noticed the mark circled around his torso, crotch then entwined itself down his left leg like a snake. Nezumi came in at that moment and asked Sion if he regretted living, which he replied, while crying, that he didn’t and that he wanted to live. Quickly recovering from the shock, Sion got dressed and helped Nezumi make soup.
After their meal, Nezumi then decided to show Sion what he had picked out of his blister, saying it was right up Sion’s field. To his surprise it was a pupa along with an egg that it had eaten its way out of though it failed to grow any further. He deducted the bee itself was parasitic, telling Nezumi that there were more than 200,000 different kinds of parasitic wasps. After a short conversation about where it may have come from, Nezumi began to laugh, which in turn worried Sion and so he poured a bucket of water on his head. He told Sion he thought it was funny that No.6 had a man eating wasp, angering Sion only for a moment. Talking about the day they met afterwards, he showed Sion one of the mice, explaining how it was a robot and how it kept an eye on him for four years.