Roleplaying
By Leareth

Prologue

No one takes chickens seriously. How can you? They squawk, they can't fly, they're only good for eggs or dinner, and they have that funny way of walking that just says, 'LAUGH AT ME.' For all you know, chickens probably snicker behind their feathers at each other. No one takes a chicken seriously – except the chicken himself.

Gushoushin Elder sat – perched, rather – on a very tall stool in front of a laptop computer typing away with a dedication that would have done Tatsumi proud. It wasn't aware of the comical sight it made (a chicken with a hat and clothes and a laptop computer? Anthropomorphism is almost frightening. No one wants a chicken to take over their desk-job); its attention was completely on the data scrolling on the screen at its claw-tips. This was only if you discounted the portion of its brain that was grumbling away like a starving stomach.

" … stupid food-scoffing walking disaster shinigami go and destroy the library and give me so much work to do and make me reorganise the entire database again …"

It sighed, dreaming for a moment about hundreds of perfect rows of shelves with perfectly stacked books organised in the most perfect of systems. Realising its attention was wandering, the chicken-like shikigami shook its feathers and attacked the keyboard with a vengeance and much grinding of beak. File after file was called up, skimmed through and saved with others of the same topic; general reports, accounts, private personnel profiles, classified cases –

Gushoushin paused, frowning. Had it just read the same thing over again? No, this was a different file, but the details were very familiar. Where had it read it before? Calling up history, it went through what it had just done previously. Finally locating the past file, it compared it with the current one. Two completely separate incidents, but the events and complaints were almost the same. What's more, both had the symbol in the top corner indicating that the case was still open.

Most intriguing. You come across a lot of interesting irrelevant tid-bits when doing research. Shrugging, Gushoushin saved the two case files together and resumed his work. It managed to do a lot before it ran into yet another case with the same facts as the last two.

First time is chance, second is coincidence. A third time is a conspiracy. What about a fourth or fifth, or even a sixth? Out of curiosity, Gushoushin did a search for similar cases. It came up with seven. It stared at the screen. After grumbling about chance and fate for a few minutes, it sat down to read through them. It didn't take long. What took long was the thinking about what all of this meant.

There really was only one thing to do. Printing out all the reports, Gushoushin flew off to find the department Chief forgetting to shut down the laptop. Chickens are rather absent-minded.

Behold, the Void @