Silence in the House of Judgement

◇ Look! As it turns out I, too, know how to blog from a mobile phone! I'm killing time in the train station at Delft. I have a shift starting in about an hour but I came early, since NS is pretty unreliable. I will forever remember leaving two hours early for an escape room up in Haarlem and arriving a half hour late, though at least the whole party was with me for that. I felt we had almost a warm-up round, figuring out how to get to the escape room, before we could leave from it!

Anyway, they have one of those public pianos here. A man has been at it since I arrived, and he's not bad at all. Jazzy little ragtime songs, though I've not recognised a one of them.

◇ I caught up on reading Umi no Hashiru End Roll. It's a manga about an older woman in her sixties who returns to university after her husband's death to go into film directing. The intergenerational friendships, the anxiety of age, her reflections on her marriage and film are all really good— also, the art is gorgeous. Maybe as someone who is returning to school for a second degree or speaks to me in particular, but I really do think it's good.

◇ A school child has commandeered the piano for scales practice. I thiiiink maybe it's time to walk to my shift now.

◇ Played that Daggerheart session with friends!

The system was really slick. I'm not a big DnD fan, I tend to be more of a PbtA or similar type games, but the fear vs hope success system was really fun, the way combat didn't have real turns so much as kept going until you rolled a fail and then the GM got to do as much as they had tokens for, the GM having a d20 so they took bigger swings whilst the players had a more reliable 2d12, it was all a very well considered system that clicked together nicely. I'm not sure how much I'll be playing it, but that's just because I don't have the corebook and I tend to gravitate towards weird little indie games.

But. I am employed now. Maybe I can save up to, at some point, do some Daggerheart.

Theatri Glacialis was also fun to play, I got to use my terrible Russian accent and be off-putting but helpful. Good character decision for a one-shot. Maybe I will play him again sometime if I do get to return to Daggerheart.

◇ One of the advantages of life in the Hague is though it's pretty small-town-ish, the museums and the embassies here mean there's still some pretty lively events every now and again. This last weekend, it was the Embassy Festival, a bunch of the international embassies set up stalls, with people dressed in cultural costumes, hawking food and pressing travel brochures on people, and two big stages for folk dance and arts. I caught the Sri Lankan dance performances! There were three, and I managed to get a spot to watch from right up front. I was looking for my home country to see what they were doing— which, was selling wine. Nothing else, just wine sales. But! Hungary was right next to Japan, and Japan had a guy with one of those super long asymmetrical bows with a traditionally dressed archer, and some people in samurai armor, and their stall was all old swords and armor. And then Korea and Vietnam set up right by the food-court area and were doing their soft power diplomacy via food, which yeah, good choice. I think Cameroon's stall was actually the most impressive though— they had sort of a dance party going on? And drummers and musicians, everyone dressed traditionally, and they'd invited a Cameroonian restaurant down from Amsterdam to provide food for their stall, so they had fish being roasted on these open fires that smelled amazing. I took one of their cards, so if I'm ever in Amsterdam and I have the money I can drop by and try it for real.

◇ And then, since everything happens at once, it was also the club-hopping festival downtown and a back-to-school movie marathon at the indie cinema near centraal. So my friends group last minute organised to watch a truly terrible so bad it's good 80s flick called Nuke 'em High, which was awful and hilarious. Most Reagan era thing I've ever watched. And then after that, the cinema was closing up but the silent disco next door was still going and they weren't charging cover or anything as part of the club-hopping festival, so four of us grabbed headphones and danced for a bit before heading home around 1 AM. All things considered, an excellent weekend.

◇ Which sort of makes up for how stressful this last school week has been.

I'm trying to rehaul my whole schedule due to last minute finding employment and inferential statistics homework taking me seven hours to complete for one assignment.

All professors involved have agreed to it. It's just a matter of finding who within the university administration has the power to actually change my schedule now. My academic advisor meeting today ended with me being told to just go to the front desk on monday and being like these are the changes I want made, the academic advisor is backing me and you can call her if you need to. So, I guess that's my monday.

◇ Skipped going to the garden today for the first time since June. I feel bad, but in my defense my right hand is still a bit injured and I don't want to open up any of my scabs digging in the dirt with a half-healed hand. I'll go next week, though.

◇ Read Erio and the Electric Doll, up to chapter 21, which is as much as is scanslated in English. There's more in French, though! Maybe I should try reading that for practice? Anyway, it's a GL manga, a post-apocalyptic steampunk story that has very nice art. I think the atmosphere is the most notable thing about it— the back-story and all that is pretty cliche robots rose up against the humans so to prevent the robots from doing that, humans stopped using electricity all together. The protagonist girls are an electric doll left over from the war and a girl whose body has been engineered to create electricity, as they travel through cities recovering from the war. I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic travel manga. There's honestly a fair few, and it's nice to see one that feels optimistic rather than pessimistic.

◇ I took down a few friend's addresses to send them post-cards! And I do have the post-cards! I just need to write them all, since I'd like to send them all out at once. Which... means I have some more to do. I've written some, just not all of them yet. It's maybe kind of a silly thing to do since we're all in contact online anyway, but I still want to.

◇ Diet time for real. It's just a few kilos but my dysphoria is acting up real bad, and I hate my clothes feeling tight.

◇ Dyed my hair! Or rather, a friend dyed it. I'm really happy with it. And since it's just the tips, if I get hired at a place that requires natural hair colour, it shouldn't be hard to cut. I'm hoping I won't need to, though.

So, my best friend is bad at audio media but we like reading scripts together— we've read a lot of enstars and mahoyaku aloud to each other, voice-acting out characters and playing the scenes. The Silt Verses sounded interesting to Kaz, but the medium was a huge stumbling block— but I remembered wait! There are transcripts!

So now, once a week, we read a chapter of the Silt Verses together.

This means I've been pretty quiet abt the Silt Verses on tumblr, lest Kaz stumble into some spoilers accidentally as we slowly read though. We just reached chapter 8. But as a side-effect of doing this really slow re-experience of canon, we end up having book-club type discussions at the end of every chapter and I try hard to not spoil anything which I am bad at but. I am trying.

Anyway, for this week, Kaz's roommate was around and there were enough Paige, Faulkner, and Carpenter scenes that we were like-- hey let's ask Moelle if they'd be up to voice a character for the three-person scenes. And realised almost immediately that it was a really funny episode to enter to immediately get the wrong impression of Faulkner. The in-universe first impression of Faulkner: what a nice boy with kind eyes experience is not usually what you think about him as a listener but in this case. That's how Moelle got to experience him, coming in totally blind.

A weird place to start.

also, a sketch page for brother faulkner:

◇ BED: FIXED.

To explain, I have a murphy bed in my flat right now to save space it folds away during the day. It has a little bar on the underside that prevents it from folding all the way down to the floor and thus hanging at a weird 45 degree angle bed triangle. Unfortunately, the bolt holding it in place popped off the other day while I was folding it down, and after 20 minutes panicking I balanced the bed precariously and investigated to find, oh, this would be an easy fix. I just needed to borrow a wrench! Thankfully, living in the Netherlands, many people have those because of how widespread bikes are. So I borrowed a set off a friend, biked an hour over to his place and grabbed them.

Then, for the actual fixing itself, the main issue became that I needed a spotter. Because if the bed fell on me whilst I was doing the repairs, that's game over. So I had to ask in the building group chat, hey can someone help me fix my bed? I have the tools and everything, I just need it held in place so it doesn't fall on me while I work.

For an hour, no takers. And then I got a private msg that was like, I'm sorry everyone ignored you in group chat. Do you still need help? I'll be home late tonight but we can do it tomorrow. And I let him know, yeah, that'd be really helpful!

So Geraldo came over the next day, held the bed in place, and we chatted while I got it done. We talked about where we were from and where we've lived before— California and Japan for me, and Curaçao and the Netherlands for him. I'd actually never heard of Curaçao before, but it's a tiny island nation in the Carribean— one that was declared independent in 2010, which is after I learned geography. So! I learned something new. But it was nice meeting him, and I let him know if he ever needs anything, to give me a shout and I'd be happy to help.

◇ Volunteered at the garden again, as I do pretty much all Sundays. The weather was very. sudden warmth and then sudden darkness and rain oh wait no it's warm again. So I stayed for less time than I usually do, but Martine is back from her camping visit in the south of France so it was nice to see her, and she told me how nice it was to come back to the garden in such good shape this year, and that last year when she came back everything was either withering or overgrown since it had been just Sandra taking care of the place. so! Validation!

I also did the usual grab as many herbs or tomatoes and whatnot as you like from the garden, so I've got veg for the week. And there were ripe golden raspberries so I had a few off the vine as I worked.

◇ Came back to Jake desperately messaging me that everyone else is out of town, can I cat sit? His and Issac's new cat is arriving today and he has work, he doesn't want it to be alone. Just make sure it doesn't fall down the stairs or anything. I'd just gotten home so I slung my bag back on and went to his place and arrived early enough I actually got to meet the cat— Tux— at the same time he did. Little black tuxedo cat with one white toe bean on each back paw, and that kitten was utterly fearless. Immediately started roaming around the room curiously.

There was also a bit of drama whilst Jake was gone when I used the restroom, exited, found the kitchen window blown open and could not find the cat. So, you know. I did the reasonable thing and climbed on the roof, just in case. The cat was thankfully not on the roof, but also didn't appear to be anywhere in the apartment, so I did a thorough check and then called Jake like hey I'd feel worse if this happened and I didn't say immediately but I cannot find Tux and the kitchen window was open. Jake was confident the cat couldn't get on the counter (which. incorrect, but fine in this case) and told me not to worry but to msg him when I found the cat.

And then, 20 minutes later, the door opened— Crystal, Issac's girlfriend, because Issac had been like oh shit no one will be there to watch the cat and independently asked Crystal to come over, unaware Jake had done the same thing. So we teamed up to find Tux— who had actually found an up-side-down black umbrella to hide in, in the entryway. The umbrella tipped over and out scrambled Tux up the stairs. So! drama over. And then Crystal discovered I hadn't seen K-Pop Demon Hunters and that was the rest of my evening.

◇ K-pop Demon Hunters: Pretty good! Fun watch. I don't have any real deep thoughts on it, though I have many shallow thoughts like: the blue tiger demon is great. The songs were very catchy. Not complexly plotted, but very tight without loose ends. I can see why it's popular.

◇ Also picked up an old horror shojo manga and read through all of it— Shi to Kanojo to Boku. Death, the Girl, and I, by Kawaguchi Madoka. It's about a young couple, both of whom can see/hear ghosts, the way this tormented them through growing up and how they found each other. The ghosts they can help and the ones they can't. Told out of chronological order, you might get a story with the couple in college or a story with one of them as children when they were still figuring out how to deal with what was happening to them. It was a long-runner so the art evolution from '88 and through into the 90s.

A lot of these kind of vignette horror series— like Nightmare Inspector, Hell Girl, or Petshop of Horrors— can tend towards moralistic in a way that's very serves you right or kind of shitty regressive misanthropic. But I think Shi to Kanojo to Boku feels very kind, particularly as it hits its stride, though it definitely sits right in that genre. Some vignette highlights: Julia's story, the unnamed ghost girl in chapter 30, and Prince Tulip.

Whoops, and now we're a week into July. In my defense: I got back from a trip from Morocco, then started running a fever that knocked me on my ass a few days, and then immediately had to move flats. I'm in the new place now, though! So, back to this. Even if I don't finish on time.

I did some rough draft initial thoughts, so now I'm going to go down the lines and see what I could put in the same fic to try and get a bingo with one (or two) fics. I'm going to start with lines that contain the middle free-space, as that's four things to put in a fic instead of five.

I am crossing off the top left to bottom right diagonal as a viable line. The WIP I have cannot easily have a cabin put into it, so that's not the line I'm going to work on.

Top to bottom center line has both Ferris Wheel and Prison yard in the same line. I think this would be difficult unless I did like. Deadman Wonderland? Which I would need to reread before I could speculate on what I could write for it.

Top right to bottom left diagonal: Lake, Barber shop, elevator + weakness. This is a viable mix. I think this would end up being the first time I wrote MCYT fic though because what's coming to mind is Aquatown.

Across through the center: This might actually be the easiest to fulfill because the Double Drabble slot. I can do double drabble + one of the prompts, and then fulfill the other pair seperately. This leaves me with ocean + [possibility/impossibility/unlikely/futile/useless] which seems to suggest an arc for a fic to me, and then a 200 word fic about euphoria, or unhappiness/sadness/discouragement/misery. I think this is the winner!

Planning done, all there is now is to begin the writing.

Now that I'm done with class for the summer, except the Morocco class trip, I've been exploring! This sometimes means biking to a random beach and going swimming with friends, sometimes it means riding the tram to a random stop (crematorium), disembarking and wandering around until I feel like coming back and riding it to the central station again. Anyway, I took pictures during that excursion!
( Canals, Fields, and the Rare Selfie )

I'd say I have no idea how I managed to get any reading done whilst studying for finals and finishing up major projects, but I know perfectly well how I managed. I'd go through my whole list of sample questions, watch a youtube video or read a chapter to distract myself so when I checked my answers I wasn't likely to confuse what the correct and incorrect answers were, write out the correct answers to all the ones I had gotten wrong, and then rewrite all the questions. Fuck around and watch or read something else, then answer them all again without any reference, see what I remembered. Rinse and repeat until I memorised all possible relevant factoids.

It's a decent method for memorisation, actually, but it takes a while and does mean a lot of my study time is fucking around doing other things.

So! Books!

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo is someone I read intermittently. I read her first before Six of Crows was a thing yet, I checked Shadow and Bone out of the Lake City branch of the Seattle Public Library when I worked up there, and needed something to read on the bus rides to and from work. This meant basically checking out a lot of YA because it wasn't something I was likely to be overcome with emotion over on the bus and ugly cry about and still enjoy without it being something I absolutely couldn't put down because it was my stop. It also meant I got frustrated with a lot of really really bad YA.

I did not get frustrated with Shadow and Bone, I liked the setting in Ravka, and while the leads were doing the usual. YA thing. It was a YA novel, I knew what I was getting into. I found the characters pretty shallow and wasn't particularly... invested or impressed with any of them? I also read Holly Black and Cassie Clare who had similar dynamics at play but they had more fun versions of the same trope and dynamic I was reading here.

Which is to say, even though I've read much better Leigh Bardugo books by now I never really expect to invest in them, and then I read them and I'm like oh yeah she really has gotten better since then. Because it's been like ages and she's written a lot more books since then. But there is still enough of that first set of books in them that I always am like ah, yeah, a Leigh Bardugo book even though that is absolutely not fair to her because there are plenty of YA fiction writers who have started to write adult fiction who still write the same damn character dynamic. I don't even mind that character dynamic. I just don't think Leigh Bardugo is the most compelling writer of it, even when both characters are separately compelling.

I think Luzia Cotado is compelling. Great character, excellent set-up. I think Guillén Santángel is... mid. He's fine but he's just overshadowed by everyone else here, and he is the primary romance. Alas and alack.

None of this actually makes The Familiar a less excellent book, though. It's just me going ah why don't I like Leigh Bardugo more. Puzzling. Mystifying. Writes excellent books and I am just like yeah, she's okay! I like her stuff well enough!

Anyway, all the side-characters were excellent, the stakes were high and it delivered on the punches so the tension was felt all throughout it and it delivered a really well-earned ending. I feel a lot of stories, regardless of medium, tend to not stick the landing so I am always happy to see one where I'm like YEAH YEAH YEAH. Also extremely well-situated, historically. There's a list of books Bardugo read in research at the back, and it really does show. This does make it a bit funny I saw a review that was panning it for not focusing on the world-building, but it's like... friend. It's the real world. If you want to know more about the position of Spain within Europe during the time of the inquisition, a handy list has been compiled! Anyway, I enjoyed the historical fantasy aspect. I'm avoiding spoilers in my overview, but Valentina and Hualit were favourite characters and that's all I'll say about them.

The Ragpicker King by Cassandra Clare

SPEAKING OF YA TURNED ADULT FANTASY NOVELISTS... yup! Here's another! Cassandra Clare's books have always been popcorn reads for me, really easy to just plow through despite their length so it's a lot of fun nonsense. She's great with ensemble casts, fun repartee, plot set-up and pay off. This is more of the same. I will say this is almost... hm. Like there were twists that I suspected but didn't 100% see coming but could trace back once it happened (Antonetta), ones I did figure out early(Falconet), and some that were set-up even in the previous book but only revealed now(The Ragpicker King). It fits very neatly together. The character motivations are all at odds, their loyalties all over the map, and figuring all of it out makes for good politicking and plotting.

But I also felt no real tension in it? Like we knew the other shoe was going to drop with Kel getting found out by Connor at some point. And then it happened. But both characters' trust in each other is so well established that there was really really no tension there of WILL THIS BE A REAL BETRAYAL? No, obviously not, Connor is not going to actually fuck Kel over. It's kind of a shame there's no... medium bastards in this book? Clare has done more gut punches in previous books and series. In this one everyone is pretty like. Baseline bit of a bastard but I really do mean a bit of one. I've seen reviews compare this to game of thrones and it's like... maybe in terms of politics exist and it's a european fantasy setting. But otherwise everyone feels like a decent person with basic humanising flaws OR they're unforgivably evil in this book. The antagonists? Unforgivably evil. The protagonists? Basically all likable. I felt the first book had more like interesting medium-flaw level characters, and some of the ones we had in the first book have, unfortunately for me, turned their acts around And since everyone in this one is either very evil or basically good, to maneuver some of the basically good characters into doing things that put others in a bad position, the actions taken felt contrived. (Conflict between Kel and Connor is symptomatic of this but it was not exclusive to just that) I don't really know what to say there. Maybe it's middle book syndrome? But it felt like it was pulling its punches. Still, since I read Clare as popcorn fiction, I don't expect to be moved by it I'm just here for a fun ride.

And as that, it fulfills its purpose. Lin's storyline is great though it was a bit like LIN OBVIOUSLY YOU ARE ACTUALLY THE GODDESS PLEASE THINK ABOUT YOUR WEIRD DREAMS YOU HAD ALL LAST BOOK AND THIS ONE. I guess this is a spoiler but it has been obvious for two books now. The reveal is like Lin finally realises it too rather than a shocker. Antonetta was less of a character in this book but I feel that's because she was there just enough to set her up for the reveal and now she has more tension but also an equal footing for her relationship with Kel. The first book was stronger overall, I think, with an ending that put everyone in a tough position and makes you feel invested in what's to come. The second book I think resolved too much of that initial tension in its set-up which makes the rest of it feel weaker, and then a lot of it is maneuvering around to get to some things that I don't think we as audience are really that worried about how it's going to go.

Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin

Wherein motherhood manifests as a disease in a small town, where women who have children are fated to fade away out of being. The metaphor is clear and simple but I think where this novel shines is in the growing up within the system and cherishing the things you have been taught to cherish— and when presented with things from the outside, the knee-jerk rejection the narrator has. And then, years later, after a long separation across time and space she returns and is able to see the place she grew up anew only to find it unfamiliar because she can now see the flaws that she was blinded to as a young woman.

Very well executed.

And then the DNFs... Just one for May, and it was Anne Bishop's Daughter of the Blood. I wanted some fun garbage, but the writing on that one was just so awful that My Immortal looks like top-quality prose next to it. I was checking reviews online and was absolutely astounded that all the bad reviews were people like oh no it's problematic and gross. I don't care if a 1000 year old sex fantasy meets a small child and is like OH SHIT YOU WILL GROW UP TO BE QUEEN and then when she is older he returns to her and is like COME IT IS TIME FOR US TO TAKE OVER THE KINGDOM. like that's really standard harmless wish-fulfillment fantasy.

But the problem is, for me, mister wish fulfillment fantasy is like, in the setting women have more power than men but what we see on page is really standard misogyny upheld by the characters within the setting in terms of their opinion on women and the way characters behave, so it already failed to actually commit to its world building despite info-dumping its way through the first few chapters. Very tell, no show at all. I can sometimes overlook that, but the characters had the depth of a puddle each so there was nothing to invest in. And all of it was written in, again, prose beneath the level of My Immortal. So I read like 50 pages and was like thaaat's enough for me and dropped it.

◇ Done with 3 out of 4 finals! Which you would think means I'm MOSTLY DONE.

Unfortunately, I also have a group research project proposal due Monday for an honours course for summer. And my portfolio is due on June 6th and I need to write... 6k more words and do about 20 more drawings. My wrist is in agony just thinking about it. But I will do my best! Half-way there!

But this is why I've been totally gone, haha. The last month or so has been solid projects and presentations and studying for finals. I feel exhausted but I cannot fall before the finish line.

◇ My laptop's been crashing lately and I've been too busy to really investigate as to why. It might just be mad because the thousand or so firefox tabs I've got open, which. I guess is really the start of my summer to-do list, start going through and sorting through stuff. Most of it is stuff like fic to read, fashion collections I wanted to look at, videos to watch for later, etc but I've not had time to that so as a result: this!

◇ Two letters arrived this week! I sent some postcards out to friends in America, and got one back with a really nice tarot card (The Strength) sticker enclosed, a note on cute stationary, and and a little patch to sew to one of my coats. I have a bunch of post-cards because I like visiting museums, so I'm going to send one back, but I'm wondering if I should scout about the city's second-hand stores for something of similar cool-factor and care to send back.

The other is because I've been playing thin black gulf via post with another friend. It's nice to have a reason to use my dip pen and it's really fun to construct the letters. ivoryandhorn mentioned she typed up her letter first before committing it to pen and paper, so we'd have a record to look back upon uncensored at the end of our game and that's a good idea. I think because the difference in the size of handwriting vs text, I'm going to handwrite out my part and then type it up, but I think having a record of what I've previously written is a good idea.

That said, I haven't read the letter yet because I'm trying not to be distracted from school stuff. I'm saving it for when I'm done with my work as a treat.

◇ Though of course it's when I can't do fun stuff that I have ideas for things to write. I won't say they're good ideas, but they're ideas!

◇This first one... well, maybe it doesn't require context, but it's easier to explain the idea properly by contextualising it with its inspiration. So! Oulipo was a french collective of writers/mathematicians who decided to try and see what happened when you constrained creativity by working within very specific forms. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is a work that comes out of this movement, and it's very cool.

Another famous Oulipian work is Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style which is the same short story written 99 times, but each time though the events are the same it's reframed through a different lens-- genre lens, tone, only through visual description, script format, etc. And while I have no desire to write the same thing 99 times...

I think it'd be fun to have a list of different "lenses" and then enstars stories and try and rewrite the stories through different lenses! You can't change events, but other than that anything else is fair game. I think it'd maybe be fun to do with other people, but tbh I don't know who else would be interested. I just think the changes made in adaption and how things are adapted is inherently interesting, and I want to see how much you can make a different thing from the same script. I'm one of those people who really likes weird staging of Shakespeare plays, so this is just how I am.

◇ In... an unexpected rarity, I got a comment over on ao3 saying they wanted to see more of a one-shot fic. A fic I did actually have an idea for follow-up. The problem is, I don't think the "sequel" is necessarily much like the original? But my taste in classic shoujo manga is like, you know. Kaze to Ki no Uta. A Cruel God Reigns. Of course I'd be happy to write more if there's an audience for it.

I just also think my work isn't really written for an audience and being aware of like, oh!! Maybe someone likes my work!! Paradoxically makes me like hm well that can't be right, if I write more they will simply come to realise that it is not their thing at all.

C'mon my guy, don't be like that. Kind comments should be motivators, not demotivators. So maybe I will try and push back against that feeling and write the sequel. And if it turns out to not be the commenter's thing, that's still fine bc it's an idea I wanted to write anyway!

◇ Enstars/minecraft death game mash-up. this one is haunting me. I have no excuse it just is.

◇ Katabasis, or A Smile as Wide as the Road to Hell. I don't think I've talked about this one here before, but it's an old project. tl;dr: In a world where the entertainment industry is run by the literal underworld, Mashiro Tomoya goes to seek his fortune.

To expand slightly more about the setting: Japan's film capital is in the underworld. Old stars and starlets live forever on film because they're already dead. There's a mystique about dying young and living forever but also an obvious taboo against the living going there, living people who go there need their food brought in by train from the overworld bc if you eat of the land of the dead you are trapped there as one of the dead, etc.

Cast:

◇ Mashiro Tomoya: a young aspiring actor. Cast as the heroine against his will, he gets everything he ever wanted. He protests he regrets it, but not enough to leave.
◇ Shino Hajime: a childhood friend and roommate. Pay is decent for people in the underworld willing to do work, as the dead don't need money to eat or live, and Hajime needs decent pay more than he needs anything else from living.
◇ Tenma Mitsuru: a childhood friend. Seen in flashbacks, but not present tense.
◇ Nito Nazuna: got Tomoya the audition. Was supposed to be the heroine, but declined. Formerly a close collaborator with Itsuki Shu. He is relieved, guilty, and annoyed by the recent turn of events.
◇ Itsuki Shu: An auteur and dead man. After being killed by Tenshouin Eichi, he has sealed himself up in a cave and screams that he's dead, go away at anyone who attempts to make him make movies again.
◇ Kagehira Mika: A former protege of Itsuki Shu. Determined to finish Shu's last film, his magnum opus, for him in hopes it will draw him out of his cave and make him live again. A wreck of a human being.
◇ Tenshouin Eichi: Owns this town, and the Yumenosaki Studio. A devil. Possibly in more than one sense. Producer on many a Hibiki picture.
◇ Hibiki Wataru: A black and white starlet, way back when. Been in this business ages. On Kagehira's current picture as a favour to the deceased. Currently in love with Tenshouin Eichi, and with harrassing Mashiro Tomoya.