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R.E.N/D Chapter 8: Knives
9:59pm, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. The wail of sirens faded as their source grew distant, and their electronic cries of alarm were replaced by the hard-jolting techno beats and psychedellic trance tracks of the city’s crime-ridden clubs. They played through the open doors of rival venues and filled the streets in competition, each seeking…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 7: A Night Still Young
9:13pm, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. The skylanes reminded Kato of an electronic Jackson Pollock painting; a bizarre and abstract wish-wash of siren lights, spotlights, neon commercials and flames all mixed together in multi-coloured, luminescent pollution. It was loud, too. Police dropships, cars and bikes sped past to cordon off the entire zone; while media…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 6: The Hospital
(Now edited and given some pretty significant changes!) 7:55pm, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. The first warning that something wasn’t right came when, despite the absence of a fire, the fire alarm went off. The alarm was a high pitched, loud, repeating bleep that, for nearly five minutes, progressed more and more to an electronic…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 5: Nothing We Can Do
(Edited to fix some errors and make it slightly better to read.) 2:00pm, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. Naka-Sura Multinational was headquartered in a gargantuan structure in western Kanto known as the Hexagon. Consisting of six towers arrayed at the six points of its namesake shape, each tower was progressively taller than the last, the…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 4: A Book by its Cover
9:30am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. Detective Sergeant Kato Akihiko stared out of the front window of his car, forced to watch the endless morning traffic and the run-down buildings of the old Tokyo Bay. Most of the buildings there were a hundred or more years old; towers, offices and apartment blocks built when Tokyo…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 3: Sleepless
4:35am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. Nami sat cross-legged in an old armchair, listening to the sounds of her shower. A muted television washed the back walls of her apartment in flashing lights, but she ignored them, her focus instead on her tablet. She was staring at a message from her supposed boyfriend, a text…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 2: Unlikely Places
1:39am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. “What a damn mess,” said a tall, Japanese man as he climbed out of his 2097 Raijin; a sleek and silver car that did not match the scruffiness of its owner. “There’s junk everywhere.” A second person climbed out from the opposite side, a dark-skinned woman with shoulder-length teal…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 1: A Pale Horse
12:05am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132. The bowels of Kanto City cried in the night, a forest of engineering and disposed machinery screeching with strain and rust. As it passed crescendo a man’s scream joined in; a terrified, high-pitched wail reaching out into darkness as he struggled to clamber and climb from his pit. When…
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R.E.N/D Chapter 0: Prologue
1:42pm, Tuesday the 13th March, 2125. The woman sat across from him in an old-fashioned grey suit, the kind of white shirt and sharkskin-coloured jacket that important people wore in old movies. She wasn’t ugly, but her professional demeanour and short-cropped silver hair weren’t to his tastes, and he kept getting distracted by the way…
Ben Drinkwater 