2025-12-26: Remixed
- Cutscene: Remixed
- Cast: Shiryuu Ryouhara
- Where: A Recording Studio in Yumezaki, Sumaru
- OOC Date: 2025-12-26
- IC Date: Aug 31 2012
- Summary: When life gets complicated, go to the studio and mix it out. Or so the saying goes. Was it a saying? Shiryuu doesn't recall. He certainly said it.
TODAY: APPT. 1PM, STUDIO, the mobile's alert helpfully reminded him.
There was a certain substructure to his life that was timed in advance to an almost militant extent, if he were to really step back and look at it. Not the entire course of it -- there were quite a few vacuous gaps in his day planning that were specifically marked as events labelled UNASSIGNED. The actual creation of each event felt passive-aggressive right down to the punctuation, seeming entirely uncalled for and judgmental in the app's tech-friendly, neutral azure font.
He decided to flout the ominous punctuation and look for pear juice in the market on the way to the studio. Alas, no such luck to be had.
It was, he mulled, an entirely pointless observation to make. It was pointless because he was the one who put out all of the itinerary, last month. He specifically remembered himself sprawled out on a couch in the club amidst a sprawling pride of slumbering dancers, tapping events absently into the phone from memory alone. Typing in the course of one's life, one haptic blip at a time. So really, he had no one else but himself to blame, if he didn't like the way his event planning handled his feelings.
Of course, he could hardly had predicted his own death, since then.
He'd decided that following the routine was probably the best way to sort things out. Getting in was the easy part. Enzan Kiritaka was the name on the registration, but all of the time was pre-paid right? Introducing himself as a member of staff with a card and a branded merch jacket got him into the recording booth, ostensibly to gather some of the files from the creator account.
He set his phone down flat on the workspace, to free up his good hand. The account laptop was already plugged into the I/O panel when he entered the booth. The staff didn't play. The sound of the rolling chair made a tiny squeak as the boy sat back, as he rocked, gliding pointlessly along the length of the workstation. It was a space he'd frequented for some time -- less so for the equipment, of which Gin had had a slew of avant-garde preferences -- and more for the acoustic treatments on the walls. The sound from the chair was a high pitched creak that didn't even get past the foam, but lower frequencies needed to be treated a little differently than a lot of the other studios in the area.
He took out the tiny spiral bound notepad from his Harai zipper jacket, flicking open to the page with his notes. Beneath the date, written there were neatly penned details about the Kamaitachi remix, titled Komachi. One of the notes was 'test with killed piano, hype vocals.' On a base level, he knew that it meant that they were planning on getting together with CLERIC today to replace the stock vocals on Kamaitachi. He remembered what, when, where, why, how.
But the memories no longer had any color. Greyed out, as if they had been experienced by someone else entirely. All that was left was clerical observations. Names, dates, times, techniques. Stripped equally of pleasure and suffering, the memories had no context, soaked in irrelevance to him. The only thing he felt about the notes on the page was a pang of distant, detached concern. It was like attending the funeral of a person you only met once.
Of more relevance to him were the three angry, shock-straight lines segregating the page from weeks ago to hours ago. The name 'Kouzou' was written there, along with three other names subordinated to it. Kazuhira. Utahiko. Tenzen. Kazuhira was marked with a question mark. Utahiko's name was cancelled entirely, with another shock-straight line. Upon reading them, the boy's lips pursed in subconscious derision, his sneakers lifted from the floor to brace heels on the chair's casters, his shoulders raised in pensive, wound energy.
His attitude would come to eventually soften in the quiet that followed. Scribbled haphazardly into the cramped page's margins were a set of colorful swatches. Made with oil pencil, the predominant one was a streak of a candy apple red, and next to it was a bloc of several smaller shades between mandarin and peach. At the very bottom of the page were three tightly scrawled, small words: "I had to," with no punctuation.
"UGH." The abrupt sound was like a smothered gunshot in the quiet studio. The notepad was dropped on the table with no small amount of aggression, leading the boy to kick away from it, turning his back in the rolling chair as if the entire notepad were being put on punishment. The hinge squeaked in tinny alarm as he leaned back, his good hand rammed through his grey hair until the feathered cut was savaged, leaving a haphazard mess in his wake.
"Stupid. So stupid. You absolute idiot," the boy hissed, to no one in particular he cared to admit. "Keep your mouth shut, if you don't know how to deal with a... grrgh."
Suddenly, violently eager, the young man unlocked the laptop to boot up the DAW. He tested the range on the hardware, turning knobs with one hand as if it were something he actually had to do, likely alarming the studio staff. A dagger-short, dagger-sharp sigh punched through the air, and he reseated himself in the office chair. Flicking off the phantom power to the condensers in annoyance and setting the transfer tracks, he continued to grouse.
"Skill issue. Why don't you just shut your mouth and handle your affairs, Ryouhara..."
UP SOON: NAGANO, his mobile's alert reminded him, helpfully.