Disclaimer: Only in my dreams do I own the pretties.
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There are times when Ryou curses himself for not having been stronger. If he'd rejected the Ring when he touched it and it glowed-- well, he hadn't had much experience with magic before that day, but he should have guessed that strange glowing objects could be nothing but trouble. If he'd screamed louder and fought harder, maybe the man in red would have stayed out of his mind.
The first day, when Ryou looped the chain of the Ring around his neck, the Ring became so hot that it nearly burned a hole through his shirt. He stuffed the shirt under his bed so his father wouldn't see the marks. The Ring got hold of him quickly, so that he only hid the scars it gave him, without a thought of asking for help.
For weeks, he dreamed of blue skies so bright they hurt his eyes, and a man in a red robe who wanted him dead. The man controlled a colossal stone snake, and the snake chased him through hot sand until his bare feet were burned so badly that the pain woke him up. There was never anything wrong with his feet, but the Ring would have burned a circle on his chest. He took to keeping a bottle of water by his bed to soothe his burns upon waking.
One morning, the man in red had not quite left Ryou's mind when he woke up. He started talking, feeding little white lies into Ryou's mind until Ryou wanted to scream. Eventually he learned to reply to the man, and then the lies weren't so bad. It was easier when he accepted what the man told him. Remove your best friend's soul from his body? Easy. Ryou only had to will it, and the soul would be his to slip into a little gold jar in the back of his mind. The soul gave the man in red something to play with, and his incessant lies came less frequently.
But the man in red told Ryou that the first soul was lonely, and could Ryou please find a second one for it to play with? A little girl's soul would be nice.
So Ryou took his little sister's soul. The police never matched the red strangle marks on Amane's neck to Ryou's fingerprints, because the man in red helped him kill them whenever they tried. The soul-jars in his mind grew in number.
It was the man in red who got Ryou to buy his first tabletop RPG, and taught him to transfer souls into little metal dolls. The soul-jars were no longer needed-- the game was
Everything would have continued going on spectacularly, except Ryou got a conscience. When he told the man in red that he no longer wanted to remove souls from their rightful owners' bodies, the man flew into a rage. That night, the Ring's spikes made Ryou bleed.
Now Ryou fights back, but the man in red has grown too powerful for Ryou to overcome him. Now Ryou wants to be saved, but his mouth is under the man's control, and he cannot move his lips to say that he's sorry, he's so sorry, could someone please help him. The man allows him his deck of cards and his friends, but never his freedom.