[closed] nobody knows where i came from, even i have forgotten

[flightpen]

Listen. Ren might be different now; he might try to avoid people; he might be haunted by everything he sees here, all the time. But he's still himself. And that means he's still, in his own way, nosy as hell. When he passes through the Velvet Room and sees a weird new corridor, what is he going to do? Not investigate it?

It seems kind of pointless, once he's in it. Like, there's only one door. They could have just put the door in the Velvet Room directly, foregone the corridor, and not used up any more space in the Velvet Room itself. Frowning, Ren tries the door.

Locked. Okay. That's weird. If it's a weird door, maybe that explains why it's off to one side? But then what the hell is it? For a moment, he's so focused on the mystery that he nearly forgets to be a grim and miserable little rain cloud.

Comments

[goldstarburst]

Unfortunately for Ren, this is when the door opens, and a frankly giant young man walks out of it without looking. He bumps right into Ren.

"Ow! Shit!" yelps Sam. "Fuck. I'm so sorry. Are you okay?"

... huh. This is when he looks up, only to see another Ren. Or is it Akira? And this one has glasses.

[flightpen]

Ren stumbles back, heart in his throat, pressing himself against the wall. But it quickly becomes clear that this guy, whoever he is, doesn't want to hurt him.

"Uh." He adjusts his glasses. "Yeah. Sorry. I shouldn't have been..."

He gestures at where he was standing, directly in front of the door. Kind of stupid, now that he's thinking about it.

...Seriously, though, who is this guy?

[goldstarburst]

Yeah, Sam isn't convinced. New possibly-Ren looks like he scared the life out of him. Or maybe kind of sick.

"No, it's fine." He runs a big hand through his hair. "I should have been looking where I was going. It's, uh, Ren, right? Or Akira? Or both," he adds, trying for a joke.

[flightpen]

"Ren. Yeah." He doesn't offer a codename like Drake did, because no one has seen fit to give him one, and he's sure as hell not going to bring it up. He can imagine the general response to his presumption. "Nice to meet you...?"

He also can't even begin to make a guess at what the guy's name is. In theory, he could be a guy Ann, if there are girl Akechis. But he doesn't actually look anything like Ann.

[goldstarburst]

"Sam," he says, offering his hand with a smile. "The other guys I spoke to didn't know who I was, either. Which is a bit of a puzzler."

[flightpen]

Ren blinks at the hand for a second, then takes it. His handshake is middling, by Japanese standards, less strong than it used to be; by Western standards, it's outright weak. "Sam. Yeah, I've never..."

He glances at the door behind Sam. A new guy no one's heard of, coming out of a new door that Ren couldn't get into, which sits in a new corridor. He can't put the puzzle together yet, but he can see the pieces.

"Where does the door go? I mean, if you don't mind me asking?"

[goldstarburst]

The handshake is a bit weak, but Sam's heard Sora rant about shaking hands often enough; he doesn't comment. "Oxford. Uh, Oxford in England, where I'm from."

He considers new Ren, who has as visible a black dog on his shoulder as Sam's ever seen. "Want to see?"

[flightpen]

He doesn't actually respond to Sam's offer with Really?, thankfully. But he does blink in surprise.

"I don't want to... you were going somewhere." Wait. "Actually, I don't know if I can get in? The door wouldn't open for me."

He does want to see it, though. Badly. Somewhere new, somewhere else.

[goldstarburst]

"Yeah, Drake couldn't get in by himself. But he could when I was with him."

He was going somewhere, sure. He was going to glare ineffectually at Igor, and then poke around in zombie Tokyo. "I didn't have any real plans. Come on, take a look."

He pushes the door open, holding it. It opens onto a bright blue day, and a big old building made of pale stone, with a shield or something over its heavy wooden door.

[flightpen]

A shadow passes over Ren's face at the mention of Drake, but it clears soon enough. He steps through the door and out into sunlight, in a totally unfamiliar city. He looks around, wide-eyed.

"Wow," he says. "It... actually looks like the movies and stuff."

Drake said something similar, though in a brighter tone, half-laughing. Holy shit. It really does look like this.

[goldstarburst]

Sam watches Ren's eyes widen, watches a little of the weight lift, with a small smile. He's proud to belong to Oxford, proud to be part of Balliol alongside Sora; proud to have saved it all. "It does, doesn't it? That's the Bodleian Library, there. 400 years old. That there is Hertford College, which looks like it's old, but they cheat."

The zombie students milling slowly past are a bit of a crimp on his mood, of course. But he's getting weirdly used to them already.

[flightpen]

He glances over his shoulder. Hertford College looks a lot like the Bodleian Library to him. "Like, they built it to look old? Were they trying to compete with Oxford?"

He doesn't know about the colleges that make up Oxford University, and has interpreted Hertford College as a separate institution. As he speaks, his gaze returns to the library. Four hundred years of books. Makoto and Hifumi would be beside themselves. Ren himself isn't on their level, but he still likes to read.

[goldstarburst]

"No, the colleges are part of Oxford. Of how it's structured, right?" He's lapsed into tour guide mode, like he did for his sister and mother; there's an odd light in his eyes, as the distance between him and them—and Sora—becomes unavoidable. "Everyone belongs to a college, and there are tons of them around the place. Thirty-four, actually, and a bunch of halls and societies and so on.

"As for Hertford"—he grins at it—"it's not as old as it looks. Not nearly. They took over the much older building of a defunct college, in the 1800s. Used to be attached to a different college, then decided they wanted to go it alone, I guess."

[flightpen]

"Oh." That's weird, he doesn't say, but it's clear from his brief silence that the concept of all the different colleges puzzles him. He gazes at the Bodleian, wondering what it looks like on the inside. How many books it has, how many weird secrets.

"What college are you in?" he asks. As he cautiously peeks out of his shell, old mannerisms are starting to reassert themselves in muted ways, among them the instinct to get people talking about themselves.