Intro to Judgement

J ud g e me nt


Have you ever looked up at the stars late at night? Just sit there honestly, and look up? You know there are people around you, and someone loves you. Why do you feel cold alone and empty? The stars are so beautiful and bright, shining on through the darkness. They seem to have a purpose, a purpose you can not only never understand or fathom in your lifetime and humanly ignorance. And still, there has to be someone out there who knows everything, who can help you and comfort you with the answers you seek.
And now it festers in you, yet another obsession, of will and power. You wish to know, and find out yourself; why is it that only the brightest stars remain when you gaze at them directly, but the others evade you and disappear when you search for them? Is this not like the others of this earth? That your friends will meet you head on, and admirers will fall away and fear of you acknowledgement. Or that a great religious leader will stand behind his teachings and answer your questions without frustration or impatience, explaining to his faith’s end; but a man who knows his professions to be a lie himself will run and sweat and dance around your prodding questions?
You look at those stars and wonder, keep wondering; are these stars real? Are they still there, out there in your universe? Who can aid you? You stare deeper into the wrapping darkness, letting it eat you and swallow you in until there is no way out. Why are you still scared? Your feet still touch the ground and you are still; why do you feel as if you are sprinting through your fears? You want to find Him; proof that there is a Him… Someone. You don’t know who. Is it a god? A friend? How will you find Them?
I have had these questions. Believe me.
Let me introduce myself; I am Mikiri Chiho, or mc. When I was a little girl, the walls of despair closed in my heart, and I could not find a way out. My brother, Iykata Chiho, was taken from me for reasons I do not know when I was young girl, my father soon after was killed. I was born eleven years before the bombings, and before the Destruction I lived a regular relatively life. Sure I had a brother that was an “everything” genius and a father that was only smarter because he was older. My mother was an activist, which is pretty hilarious because my father was one of the Seven Nation’s seven scientists.
Plagues broke out when I was about nine, approximately two years before the disasters, and my family moved to Japan, a safe island, and one of the few places still sanitary. Quarantines were established all over and all the major religious leaders of the world began proclaiming Earth’s ending and the Final Judgment. My family was firmly religion-less, so we could only look from the scientific view of my father that they all had the plague.
Except Iykata didn’t catch this idea grandly. He instead began locking himself in his room, reading more often, and giving me thoughtful smiles when I blabbed about the hottest kids in school. He suddenly proclaimed that someone was coming… for us. We couldn’t know what he was talking about, because he fainted soon after and was unstable in the next few weeks. A year later, the kidnappings began. Worldwide, mass disappearances that had no conceivable connection unless you turned the fanatic supernatural. The preachers of truths and holy words were among the first gone, then others, simple people and world leaders alike, gone over night. There was no way to tell who was next, until the day I lost my brother.
He had just turned fourteen; I was eleven. We played on the living room floor, listening to the buzz of the TV on the news turned mute, Mom whispering to relatives on the phone. “There’s no way out, no way out… it’s hopeless.” She hissed over and over again. Iykata sat quietly creating over and over, sketching endless scratches and scribbles that always had a strange identicalness. Then he looked up at me, pencil posed over the paper as if me and my Barbie doll had interrupted him.
“Mikiri, there is a way out. There is a way out too…” he trailed off, ducking his eyes back to his papers. “You have to believe for me, ‘K?” he smiled. Then, that night, before I went to bed, I snuck to his room, but all I saw was a bright light. A strange creature with what seemed to be black wings turned from the midst of the light, grinning at me. I couldn’t see anything but its brilliant smile. It turned away, walking out the window I couldn’t see, through the bright light.
“Believe!” cried my brother’s voice, repeating in my brain. But I don’t. I might have then, but I have lost it. But now I know, there is something for me to find, and I have only little time to find it. The world had been thrown into a dark terror movie, filled with snarling monsters and a sun that only comes out for three hours before tucking away behind the smoggy sky. The stars no longer shine for me, but I still gaze at my sky, wondering the same questions.

I like the first half, with all the questions, it has me wondering, and feeling the protagonist wondering beside me. I like the idea of a story that you tell me in the second half, it is a good one, but you tell me to much of what is and has been going on to fast. You tell it in such a detached manner, that I end up thinking only 'that's interesting'. I think it would work better if you threw me into the story, with Mikiri actually doing something (maybe the scene where her brother disappears?) and slowly give me pieces of the back story, in manageable bits that I can swallow. Make me wonder about things.