April 9th

I was woken up by the train's announcement that I was about to arrive in Shibuya. I was sitting on a train, going to a place I hadn't been before and where I would now be staying with everything that had happened recently after everything that had happened recently. The train was extremely packed.

People were gossiping on their phones and just going about their daily lives. I was wearing a white shirt and a pair of blue jeans. I remembered how I ended up here.

A man was forcing himself on a woman.

"Please, help!" I heard her cry.

I put my hand on his shoulder and he fell in a drunken stupor.

"Damn brat..." he said. "I'll sue!"

I tried to ignore it. It wasn't something I needed to dwell on at the moment. It was in the past. All I needed to do was accept what happened and move on with my life until everything blew over. It was how I dealt with the other hardships in my life. This time would be no different.

"What? Are you for real? A mental shutdown?"

A mental shutdown. I looked up to see a couple of girls, who seemed close to my age, talking a few meters from where I was sitting.

"It's the truth!"

The girls both seemed like airheads.

"To a person though? That's gotta be a joke. You really love all that occult stuff, don't you?"

I quietly observed the conversation. I wonder what that's about. I was still getting used to my glasses. It a cosmetic choice to make me look more innocent. I tried my best to stay awake, almost nodding off before I noticed I was getting closer to the station. Time to start my new life in this city for the next year. I grabbed my black bag and swung it over my shoulder as the train slowly came to a stop and everyone bundled off. I stepped off the train and manoeuvred through the crowds of people. I was in a new environment. I made my way up to the busting streets of Shibuya. Like the rest of the world, I had seen the famous crosswalk via video and photos but never in person. The mass of people seemed like an entity. My phone buzzed, making me reach for it. I saw what I at first thought was an error message but it was actually one strange app that suddenly appeared. The red and black icon looked almost like a menacing looking eye, that felt as if it was looking back at me. I tapped on the eye and it grew in size across the screen of my phone. I tapped it a few more times to try and get rid of it. I looked back up from my phone and couldn't believe what I was now looking at. Everything had stopped around me, the people had all stopped on their phones, the cars had all stopped in the streets and even the clouds remained motionless in the sky. However one thing was moving in the distance, a pair of blue flames coming from the centre of the mass of people in the square. The flames grew more so to take a more humanoid shape. Panic rose in me and I looked round for any kind of help. Two burning wings suddenly ripped from the figure that now formed in the flames. The flames erupted to reveal myself.

After that, it all disappeared, time resumed and life suddenly returned to the mad rush of people in the crowds around me. I heard those girls talking about mental shutdowns. Is that what just happened to me? I dragged the app to the trash bin.