2026-05-23: There is no box

• Cutscene: There is no box
• Cast: Futaba Sakura
• Where: The Palace of Futaba Sakura
• OOC Date: 2026-05-23
• IC Date: Tue, Nov 13 2012
• Summary: Shadow Futaba becomes extremely angry, and for once, it goes somewhere.

The Shadow of Futaba Sakura stood, in a room in a tomb in a place that wasn't anywhere at all. She stared at an open box.

There had been no one in the tomb for days, now, as far as the Shadow could tell. (The sun did not move; where does one day end and another begin?) Only her, and the murmuring distant handful of Shadows, wandering in their corners. The great alarm had ended. Quiet had returned.

Now that Shadow Futaba knew what disruption was, the peace of old seemed like a thin memory. Somehow, despite perfect recall, it was distant, grayer.

It made the Shadow angry, but then, so did a lot of things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeqNDE90Pvs

She could remember her injuries. There were ninety-two such items, from before all of the ruckus began, and sometimes Shadow Futaba counted them to pass the time. A dozen or so were rather murky, from her infancy. Others were in fine focus and more poignant: denied trips, the mockery of her peers, a raised voice, a cancelled television program. Each of them stuck in her mind, a splinter in a finger, a knife stabbed into a great tree trunk, an etching in granite.

One or two were the Shadow's own.

One was undeniably the Shadow's. Though it had not been apparent to either the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, nor to other interloping parties, Shadow Futaba could not touch things. Or, to describe it in strict terms, she could not exert meaningful force against other objects. Her own hair, her glasses, her headdress; these she could touch, maneuver, adjust. The tomb walls, the statues, the Shadows, the scatterings of treasure like the plundered box before her: these were only sensations to her. She could be acted upon; yet she could not act.

They could hurt her back, of course. The scuffs and marks on her arms and legs had healed some time ago, but the Shadow remembered them, for they were hurts, and she nurtured a brood of hurts. Gnawing at herself in this tomb of her inevitable demise, she faced a bleak future, or none at all, and she had hoped and planned for the latter, as far as she hoped at all.

The ninety-third was different. The ninety-third was new, for one thing; for another, though only the Shadow had heard it, it was equally hers and 'that girl's,' of the Shadow and the Futaba Sakura in the world of the living (for now).

For another, she had thought of it in advance. With no power to influence the world, with no strength, the impotent fury of the Shadow had been interrupted by long thought and introspection. What else was there to do, count the grains of sand? She had always had a certain industrious character. There was enough honest, enough rigor of thought, in her to separate out the imagined and possible hurts, the wounds-that-truly-were, from the wounds-that-might-happen-if-something-preceded-it. If she'd included all of THOSE, the list would be in the low tens of thousands. Not, of course, that she was counting.

But what had moved that wound from the list of might-bes and maybes into the burning, agonizing litany of that-which-was had come from the lips of that interloper. The man in the black mask. The man who had *frightened* the Shadow, a sensation wholly unfamiliar to her. She had often thought of death and oblivion with something like hope, or at least the anticipation of relief; instead, she had been *afraid*.

Afraid that she would know and not-know; that she would perish in ignorance, collapsing into a mirror-shard box of confused agony before oblivion came, in a hospital ward or in a street crossing of her own, daughter following in mother's footsteps.

Afraid that it might instead be an eternal moment of death. Oblivion is one thing: to experience one's final moment as a melting idee-fixe and never know otherwise held far subtler terrors.

Afraid that she would know, but only to know that there would be no revenge.

Once the Phantom Thieves and the man in the black mask had left, the Shadow had taken some time to find calm enough to think, to focus, to plan. At that point, she had set out to systematically try to manipulate her environment, ghostly and accursed impotence be damned. About sixty attempts to leverage her perceptions of touch to some manipulation of objects, however paltry, met with no success whatsoever. Commanding the Shadows did not work, either: she could get their attention, but they did not take her commands, obedient to either her subconscious (the Shadow of the Shadow, thought Shadow Futaba, with a certain sardonic irritation) or their own whims.

Several hundred more had been attempted invocations. Futaba's hungry reading of gorgeously photographic books on the histories of the Pharaohs and their tombs had shown her a number of invocations, prayers, and sorceries, many of which the Futaba Sakura of the world of flesh had not recognized. The Shadow had a different perspective, but all of them had been useless; the sole exception, on excited repetition, had been a false positive. A cognitive snake had slithered at a fortuitous time. Nothing more than that.

A number of theoretical approaches were developed, frozen in several different stages of refinement, tested systematically. None did anything. All of them only reinforced the helplessness of Shadow Futaba.

She was down to this. A crude effort indeed, and a forlorn hope, but the presence of hexadecimal logic in this chamber -- a puzzle that the Phantom Thieves had somehow, miraculously, solved without grinding aeonic experimentation -- put the idea in her head, and she was, after all, the Ruler of this Palace, was she not? It was her right to try. If it ripped space itself open and led to a swift and sorry end, at least it had been by her own hand.

She had spoken charms and spells in all the languages she knew; Python and perl, emacs and powershell. Anything at all to try and evoke a change. These too, were nothing.

It was, to be frank, starting to piss her off.

But Shadow Futaba had nothing else to do, and so, she stared at the box. Zero to one. One to zero. It would have to be one or the other. It was interchangeable in a sense; depended on whether the 'rest state' of the box was to be closed or to be open. She had, at least, satisfied herself that it was not some more complex object.

There was nothing else. The Shadow might draw a little cold comfort, to know that there was only the dire potentiality of nothing, dead end, no hope, only hoping that the Phantom Thieves or Mr. Laurent might, in a miraculous last ditch, accomplish something - a reprieve, maybe, if not salvation. (Though Shadow Futaba did not have a consciously high opinion of anyone, even herself, she had to admit that however hapless her other self was, she had at least been able to call for help, and some of it had arrived. It was at least one up on the Shadow, tomb or otherwise.)

But instead she only felt *irritation*. A great helpless fury was kindling inside of her. The emotional acid seemed to flow upwards and it was all aimed at the box. A simple thing, honestly quite sumptuous, clad in precious metals - gold, to some extent, at least. How dare it? How dare this simple box, with its plundered simple contents, resist her? At all of this, at the final redoubt, with only forlorn hopes and the certainty of death for her company, would this crude object defy her?

Shadow Futaba remembered the yawning black void of the gun's mouth, and the grinning face beyond it.

Her hands squeezed fists. Thin, small, useless fists, but fists nonetheless. That sensation was growing hotter. If she stopped this non-effort she would throw herself against the side of the sarcophagous the box was in, beating it with futile, forceless arms. She might break and wound herself, even tear her frail body to shreds in her tantrum. She might die; or worse, live on, un-dead and mutilated.

Slowly, distantly, the Shadow became aware of her heartbeat. It was a brief and interesting thought - she didn't think she had one - but it grew and grew, hastening in force and acceleration as the world seemed to shrink and telescope, that box rising in its simple, empty mockery to engulf the entire field of view before her eyes.

Another short, sharp escalation. She could taste bile at the back of her throat. The Shadow was aware her chest was heaving; she'd hunched forwards. A sudden visitor would have seen her wide-eyed face wracked with a terrible rage. A few subtle wisps of violet light radiated out around her, but these dim gutterings threw no heat or force. It only burned its bearer all the faster.

Faster and hotter, hotter and faster.

He did this, thought the Shadow.

I could have rested forever, awaiting the end, but he did this.

He did this to me, Shadow Futaba thought, remembering the face of the black mask.

HE KILLED MY MOTHER

Shadow Futaba's face twisted and SOMETHING came out; it stuttered through the world, like a blow from every direction and none falling upon the Shadow. She fell to her hands and knees with sudden, terrible weakness; vomited some strange black fluid; felt her head scream as if every tooth and every nerve was on fire; and then she fell to the stone floor, and was silent.

(In the world of the real, Futaba Sakura felt a sudden dizziness. Her heart rate spiked. She turned away from the computer, stood up, found she couldn't quite do it. She lurched towards her bed, making it most of the way, sprawling belly-down mostly-atop it. For a few moments she wondered if she was going to die, before falling into a swoon of her own.)

Time passed, as it always does.

Shadow Futaba felt it pass. The pain faded, like frost on a cold spring's morning.

If she had died, it was not different from where she had been before, and eventually, she moved one arm. An hour or so later, she got both hands under her and pushed herself up. Head resting against the side of the sarcophagus, she rested for another moment or twenty before she brought up one hand.

Grasping the lid of the empty sarcophagus, Shadow Futaba pulled herself up. She exerted no force on the sarcophagus, but she was moving her own body, and she could not muster herself to fade into nothingness. Not right now. If she did, she might simply disappear, she feared. Feared?

Shadow Futaba reached her feet, and stared at the wall of the tomb chamber for moments longer. A little more, and she could stand on her own. Shaking still, but upright. Whatever had happened, she had survived it.

Shadow Futaba's head tilted down; her eyes turned faster. She looked within the sarcophagus.

The box was closed, and seemed good as new.

There were few of the higher sentiments in Shadow Futaba; even their appearance was largely from deficiencies in other motivators, or several negative vectors interacting alchemically into something conditionally positive. In the main, her spite had sustained her. Looking at the box, and its objective, concrete reality, something new entered the Shadow's mind: Hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4W8QWdFd2E

The world *could* change.