Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 4 (section)

===Record 73: The Hole in the Sky===

'''07/21/1998

'''21:04

“July 20 was ocean day. I hear it was a wonderful day.”

I spoke to myself in the night while looking down at my palms stained with blue paint. The Boss sat next to me looking at his palms stained with sunset-colored paint.

“July 21 is an unhappy day used to resolve the troubles brought by the happy day preceding it.”

“Stop slacking off, you two,” said Snowy, wiping the black paint from her palms behind us.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said and took a look around. We were on an artificial beach not far from Tokyo Bay. And we were sitting on…

“Why does it have to be an industrial tarp instead of real sand taken from a real beach?”

It was dark out and we were facing an ocean of words with some outdated slang wastewords mixed in. By watching the outdated slang wash up on the beach, I could feel my vocabulary growing in a weird way. Groovy.

I looked into the sky. It was already night, but there was a 5m hole in the sky.

That was thanks to the stars making an ultra-high-altitude dive into the ocean when it was opened up yesterday. Those of us who live here on the surface can’t get past the Great Canopy to access the outside world, but the stars can descend into a temporary body down here in Tokyo. Thanks to that, Tokyo had become something of a resort for them.

“Is Senpai doing the painting right now?”

“Yes. It is an hour before Lady’s shift ends, but it is his duty to match the city hall’s schedule.”

“Yeah, because Lady got addicted to Nancy and started laughing out of nowhere,” said the Boss. “It affects her faster because she’s so small.”

Snowy jabbed him from behind with her paintbrush handle for that.

“Do not mock people for their body type.”

“You didn’t have to jab me.”

“Be glad I did not use my Mobilized Writing.”

I moved between them and tried to calm the irritation growing between us.

“Calm down, you two. How about we go do something more radical and far out?”

I ended up using slang from the wrong era. ''Huh? I didn’t mean to say that,'' I noticed while the Boss and Snowy slowly exchanged a glance before pointing at me.

“Hey, Snowy. This idiot’s been infected by the old words.”

“Corrupted would be the better word. Idiot, however, was the perfect word choice.”

“What an awful thing to say, my amigos.”

“Oh, shut up. Excuse me, is there a medical team nearby? We have a case of Ocean Lover’s Syndrome over here!”

“As if. I’m doing hella fine over here.”

Uh, oh. It really did feel like the language center of my brain was being violated.

Then you arrived with some food in a paper bag. You took one look at me and…

“You look like you’ve been having fun. So what have you been doing? Something stupid no doubt.”

I recovered instantly. Yes, instantly.

'''Author Comment:

Wastewords are also touched on in the Osaka game’s Tokyo trip.

If the stars enjoy diving, I bet they go to the Fault for fun as well.