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sea-salt-child · 2 years

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That Which Is Seen

(I'm sick so I'll be uploading a bit of the fanfiction on tumblr. The main deal is on AO3)

Chapter One: 1022 Doors

It was around 3 PM on a dreary, hot summer day. The kid pulled his mom along, excited to see the new cards at the store. She was tired, yes, but glad to see him happy about something, given his mood had been very poor these last few days.

The noise that broke through the air was unpleasant. At once, all the speakers blared out the tinny sound of microphone interference for what seemed like forever.

The boy suddenly covered his ears and squatted down onto the floor.

Slowly, a voice resolved itself through the ringing. A man, frantic, barely intelligible, trying to get it across to everyone. Trying to make it known. Speaking the words that would be burned into this corner of the city for years to come.

“The God of Random Numbers-! It’s a God! I saw it, I saw it outside, from the tower- it spilled and- and it was-” Words growing nonsensical. “Ripoffish”, “Understandable as a snapshot”, “Returnlike feedback”. Silence in the building, people paralyzed, drinking from the fountain of knowledge. “Alunacy, rinterion casts, spreading forever inside but now everted again, castipools and maid made nonsiege, holding me before any of you and- and- and-”

The audio was cut off all of a sudden. There was nothing at first, one could have heard a pin drop. The child remained on the floor, the mother stuck in place, unable to reach for him.

Someone, somewhere, moved.

Everything exploded into chaos.

-- Teeth --

It’s quiet in the little room, the place where you rest every night. Reds and blacks, toys scattered around, blankets and treats atop colorful counters.

The little sheep that looks more like a cushion is atop the tea table, besides a knocked down cup. It’d be soaked if it weren’t for the magic of dreams keeping its fleece warm and fluffy. On the floor, next to all the crayons and papers, having spent a while drawing and drawing and drawing, the black cat cries in its sleep. The fox, who is always up late, is nowhere to be seen.

You rest your head on the sheep, sighing heavily into him. So nice. He’s smelling like tea now, heavy and floral.

From the dark, the Ringmaster calls your attention, just a pair of yellow eyes floating, undefined.

“It will be morning soon. You’ll wake up with the birds.”

You whine and turn away, refusing to hear any of it.

“I’ll just stay here until late. I don’t wanna go wake mom up again.”

Don’t wanna repeat all these tedious morning rituals, all these reminders that something broke that cannot be fixed.

“You’ll want to be awake for today. Lots of things happened.”

“And how would you know? You are just a dumb dream thingy.”

“...What about this, then. If you don’t wake up, then, when the fox shows up, you won’t have your proxy up.”

That’s what he calls them. The little animal things. The loneliness mementos. They showed up one day and never really left, along with this room and its master. All of it comforted you, yeah… but also came to remind you of how empty you are inside yourself. Like inhabiting a room far too large, becoming unable to fill everything in at once.

Whenever you wake up, he promises to leave your proxy up as well, so you may belong in some sense. A stand in that fits in place… and you don’t want to not have it up for something like a reunion.

“Mean.”

“Uppy up. Come on.”

Uppy up.

…

You open your eyes.

The room is still dark, with the windows closed as they are, but sunshine still manages to break in through the sides and top, refusing to be stopped by even the best efforts of the curtains.

Standing up, you hear the dogs outside. They don’t come into your room. They don’t know you at all- and neither does she. You yawn, stretching, stretching the dream away. The details peel off and fall to the ground with a pitter patter, lost like dandelion fluff on a windy day.

Long ago, you liked to stay up late. Not anymore, not really. It’s always harder to do this when she’s already awake and going about her day. When the unsettling feeling of being in a haunted place has already flooded in and you have to reveal yourself as its ghost.

Nothing acknowledges you as you open the door and leave your room.

Hers is nearby. The door doesn’t even creak when you push it open. You approach, but don’t try to wake her yet. Instead, you pick up the laminated card you have prepared for this.

YUYA’S FAQ FOR MOM!!

Q: Who are you?!

A: I’m Sakaki Yuya! Your son!

Q: I have a son? A: Yes you do. But you forget me every time you don’t think of me for a while.

Q: How?

A: God did it to me!

Let’s get food. You always leave a ton of reminders around the house because of this, so you can check them to know what we had planned for today :D

…

That’s just how it is.

It’s not just mom, not at all- everything and everyone forgets all about you so very quickly. You vanish from the mind, from any records, from everything.

You try to take it in stride. You really do!

It’s not easy.

Shaking mom awake always takes a bit of effort. As always, she is surprised, but someone this given to just adopting anything in adoption range, she doesn’t freak out or anything, even if she seems worried.

You hand her the card and worry turns to confusion, then to something odd and almost pained before settling on a smile.

“Well… let’s do as this says, hm? A big breakfast is bound to break the tension here.”

She’s nice.

Mom’s always nice.

But she can’t recall you at all. She’s just meeting a stranger every day, trying her best to be a mom, but being unable to connect with all your history. But you do recall her, in her entirety, with each passing day, from the beginning.

She forgot about you, who were right there on that day and ran, swept by the crowd.

It isn’t long before you go downstairs to watch some TV while you wait for the food to be ready. The signal is really touch and go in the Isolated Zone and most channels are just straight up blocked. Usually you can at least count on some reruns of shows and recent-ish duels from the outside world, but it seems today is not your lucky day.

You groan and eventually settle on the only channel that is ever available all day long- the dumb LDS news channel.

In the days after the tragedy, it was used to broadcast all kinds of news and help reorganize the newly created Isolated Zone into some semblance of order. Nowadays it mostly just shows ads and occasional updates that amount to “Nothing new under the sun! Sorry folks, you’ll just have to rot in this place for some more years!”

“Here, it’s all ready. Pancakes. We may need to go to the market tomorrow, though… Here’s hoping that those guys stop being stingy about flour of all things! They got us stuck, they will have to deal with me baking my way through this!”

You snicker as you sit down to eat. Indeed, pancakes. And, in true “every day of my life I watch Michio’s show reruns” fashion, scrambled eggs fancied up with all kinds of side ingredients. And orange juice.

“I can go fetch extra if they refuse to give you enough. Their computer is stuck registering me as new every time.”

You fork some of the pancakes. So fluffy. So sweet. Yoko bonks you over the head.

“I refuse to believe I raised you to be that tricky, young man!”

A little wind blows your hair. It’s from her fan. The little hand fan she had that day, now stuck forever buzzing, embedded to her arm.

“You are gonna get my hair tangled on that thing!”

She rolls her eyes- but does move away to take her own seat. More forkfuls of the pancakes as she eats her own breakfast.

“So. What are you plans for today, dear?”

She really can’t ask for anything more specific. You shrug.

“I’ll go see if anyone feels like dueling over at LDS, I guess. Just spend some time outside. Uh, tonight we were meant to replace the post its and reminders together, also. They are fading again.”

“Oh.” She, does sound genuinely sad, hearing that.

It’s a nice thing, how much she cares about commiting you to memory somehow. Sure, it has made the house a mess of corkboards, reminders, photos, pinned messages, recordings- but it is a physical reminder that you aren’t being given up on.

Her voice picks up again.

“Well, then, I’ll make sure to look for some fun supplies to make them more lively together! Ah, I wish we were at the old house… your dad had enough supplies of glitter and colored papers to last an eternity.”

“What’s the point of entertainment if you don’t get to overuse glitter?” You joke, downing the last of the pancakes with juice, made very sour by the sugar in your mouth, before moving onto the eggs.

“Maybe the point is to not make this house an uninhabitable sparkly hellscape, how about that?”

…

“I wonder what happened to the old house.”

“I bet Syuzo-san is taking care of it. Same about the school.”

“You’ve talked about him before.”

“Mmhm, it’d be weird not to. He was a good friend of ours. He had a small daughter, around your age I think?”

“I’m fourteen, mom.”

“Then you should be the same age. She was a very sweet girl.”

“...I think we were friends.”

“Aah, so nostalgic! It makes me want to climb up that tower and kick those stuffy executives into action! I’d give anything to get back out.”

“Don’t get into too much trouble!”

“Shouldn’t I be the one telling you things like that?”

You finish up the food and stand.

“Maybe! But you don’t even know if I’m a troublemaker for you or not, so!”

“Well, those aren’t exactly comforting words” She replies, light hearted. “Wash your teeth before you go.”

---

The sky is grey. Grey and streaked with odd colors. This is how it has looked since that day, though the exact hues of it change often.

The world always seems fuzzy under these shimmering lights. You suppose it fits for somewhere as weird as the Isolated Zone. It, at least, is no weirder than the metallic chambers containing small floating voids in this place or whatever is going on with the graveyard.

There are currently 43 people alive in this place, out of thousands that were first caught in the initial outbreak. Out of them, 12 are employees over at LDS- the tower from which it all spewed forth. Further 15 were students at their dueling school. The remaining 16 are civilians. Civilians like you and mom.

Needless to say, having so few people around kind of makes this place a ghost town. You used to like exploring, given all this freedom- but. Over time, it sort of became too depressing to handle.

Reminders of those that are no longer, everywhere. Houses collecting dust, frozen in the moment, capturing the last seconds of people you never got to know. And the mall, the epicenter of the tragedy, where even now corpses still turn up and have to be hauled away.

It’s a fossilized world.

A tragedy, still in motion to this day, finishing off at a glacial pace while everyone pretends like somehow this will get solved.

You wish your dad hadn’t disappeared when he did.

Yes. Disappeared. Without a body, without any proof he may have died, you refuse to even think of that possibility. No way he would just abandon you forever.

Ah… haha! You lower your goggles onto your eyes and spin in place, putting on a big smile. God, that was a depressing train of thought! No need to think so hard about that kind of thing just because you are going to the stupid tower!

The duelist kids that live there aren’t always up for a duel, and they are very tough- especially since you haven’t been able to update your deck in forever.

(No one has been able to. The biggest card store was in the mall. Someone exploded there, they think. They became everywhere and can’t be washed off the walls)

Still! Those are the people that you can play with and play with them you will! It’s all about having fun in the end, right? Putting on a show and trying to get a smile out of them. You, mostly end up making a fool of yourself, really, but since no one can actually remember you, it’s no big problem.

Can’t ruin your reputation if no one knows you, ever!

Though, something is… wrong, today.

Very wrong.

You almost run into one at first, since they are almost invisible save for that… vibration. That contained shudder in the shape of a door. Once you acknowledge one, however, your brain fills in the blank.

Today, around LDS tower, there are 1022 doors.

And from inside the one right in front of you, a scream.

That voice… that’s, it’s someone you know, right? One of the girls you’ve dueled with sometimes- her name is Nene. Her name is Nene, she has always been a quiet, timid girl, and now she is screaming her heart out.

You rush inside.

Darkness.

An immediate tightening in your chest. These doors, you suddenly know, are connected to each other and themselves. This is a fractal pattern that repeats in tinier and tinier paths that wind down to the smallest pieces of you. By the wonder of these connecting ‘lines’ and ‘loops’ and their manifestation as things: ‘vibration’ and ‘doors’, things exist, including you in this space, with your feet upon a whiteblue path made of disjointed ceramic pieces.

It isn’t just you and Nene here.

It shakes, it flutters, it is close by. You know it, because everyone does. Everyone knows, everyone is resonating with it ever since. The God that crawled from the tower and made itself known. The God that spreads a changing tune.

Your mouth waters.

Her yells suddenly turn into retching and you are snapped back to reality. To, to this reality adjacency. What is this? Where is this? It is a parallel imitation of the world and it runs into you as a problem down to the smallest parts. There is no scale at which there is a concrete yes or no.

The path winds and divides and you take all intersections at the same time as the world becomes unable to recall all your past trajectories. Everything in here is a rough translation of the woes outside.

Your brain feels scrambled and you know you can’t stay for long or it might stay that way.

Two, three, five, one, seven, half and a quarter and skipping stones.

It breathes down your neck.

It is an absence and it is everything at the same time. It is really a snapshot, spread everywhere but also along everytime.

Ah- she’s there. Just around the corner. On her knees, staring, unable to move, making strange noises, shaking, shaking, shaking.

The air is full of static as you approach. It cuts into your skin and you shield your face with your arms. Repulsion, incompatibility. Objects rain from above.

Crayons, blankets, chairs and toys. You are suddenly terrified that the God of Random Numbers will rip the proxies off your head and leave you alone in an emptiness larger than life.

Eyes closed, you kneel besides her.

“Nene-”

“How did it get out? How did it get out?!”

“Nene, get up, let’s go. Let’s go.”

“Everything was inside.”

“We can’t stay. Come on.”

She is reluctant to stand up, but does so, unsteady, and you support her.

“Ah- ah! Ah! It’s going in, in a box. It’s going in a box-! Who is there?!”

She struggles. Unable to open your eyes for your own good, you drag her away. Static clings to her and leaves shallow cuts. It has forgotten you.

“They can’t- it’s getting taken-”

The world is unwinding. Something critical really did get taken. How does a God fit in a box? How does change fit anywhere except for in the space between skin and flesh?

When you open your eyes, the darkness is full of the same red velvet as the room in your dreams. Is the Ringmaster here? Everything is raining down and the only reason why you even notice you went through the door again is because there’s suddenly light.

Light, fluorescent and burning.

Somehow, you wound up in the main lobby, coming in through the doors to the building.

The woman at the front desk- and you don’t remember her name right now- almost jumps in surprise and right away, hits a button, calling for some help.

She approaches and you do your best to stay upright, supporting the girl that is bleeding all over. Thankfully, the woman takes the burden away from you.

But the shaky voice hangs in the air.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Someone, I saw someone coming out of Yusho-san’s old room and, and I went to follow them because they were going towards the card room no one is allowed to enter. And, and they went through one door and suddenly all was so dark-”

…Dad’s room?

Why…?

Your head hurts.

A pair of people come in, there are hushed words you barely understand. One of them asks who you are and you can only shake your head. Did the Ringmaster fall out? Did the proxies hit the ground and disperse in that dark room? You want to fall asleep and see.

“Look at me- kid-”

Someone moves your goggles up.

Why are you tearing up?

Someone, at the magical epilogue of everything, neglected to tell you something important, right?

“Someone came out of dad’s room?”

“What-”

They wouldn’t know a thing. No one really knows a thing.

“Did Yusho have a kid?”

“I don’t know.”

You step back.

“Kid, if you know anything about this, it is critical that you tell us about it.”

Someone else is coming down. Four- this is one third of the total workforce here.

“The card is gone.”

The lady from the front desk is already leaving with Nene to the infirmary.

“What card.”

Someone steps towards you. Tension. Hostility.

“Listen. It will be best to comply, here-”

Your head droops to a side. Words fall like water, so as to wash it all away.

“Do I know you?”

There is a moment of confusion as the context of your presence here becomes blurry, distant, then gone. As once again, everyone in this world forgets you. Information that hates itself, that kills itself, that dips into the dark to never return, that is quieter than dreams, more fragile than anything else.

You turn- then run out and away.

-- Lungs --

At first, you fought against it, tooth and nail. Tried to fight against anyone who came into your room to give you food, tried to sneak out, even tried a daring escape through the window, nevermind the height.

They always caught you and put you back inside without problems.

This weirdly warm and nice room. Stone walls, a fluffy bed. Better food than you could ever afford in Synchro. But also, the unforgivable stripping of your freedom and the weight of being so far away from your one friend.

Eventually, you had to switch up your strategies. If brute force wouldn’t work, you might need to gather information- a difficult task for someone stuck in a tiny room like this.

So, whenever someone would come in, you would ask them to stop and chat. Say you were lonely. That you wanted to at least know a bit about your current whereabouts.

You noticed that the kids coming in often said they had no time to indulge you, staring with big empty eyes, dulled into something dangerous and strange. Not a human expression. Something unnerving, that would be more at home in the face of one of many chained mutts stuck to tiny yards as guard dogs back home than in a person.

You memorized schedules and the people who would arrive. Took note of their strangeness. How often someone might come in injured and simply not acknowledge anything around them besides their duty.

“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, but, can you stick around a little longer? It’s been really lonely in here and, this is all still so confusing. I want to know more-”

That day’s person stared at you.

A sharp smile.

“Yeah, yeah. You’ve been asking for that. I actually asked if I could actually chitchat with you and I was given the clear~ Not right now though. There’s lots of classes coming up. I’ll be in charge of bringing you dinner some nights and we can talk then.”

Yes. That was… a couple months ago, now?

If you had been hoping to gather information that would be useful in your escape, your conversations with him dashed that hope altogether. He was glad to let you know about Academia and how it worked, but never let slip anything useful, really.

You did come to understand it all better, though. The kind of despairing nest where you got stuck. What those stares meant. The kind of horror you were now roommates with.

He spoke of everything calmly.

You chided him much when war was first brought up- but he didn’t care for your impassionate words. It was like speaking different languages, really.

But still. He was sassy and could be weird, but seemed… just as lonely as you. Playful at times, then gloomy other days, but always trying to be a pleasant enough presence bringing you the tricklings of news you could get in here.

Though he would have disagreed, you really started to think of him as a fellow prisoner more than anything.

No point in hating someone like this. No point in hating the people bringing you food. If anything, your fury should be well aimed at the people you never got to meet in this place. The Professor he spoke of with reverence. The staff running this shitshow.

“Do you like the meals you get here, Rin-chan?”

“Yeah. I guess. You guys get some nice stuff.”

“The fish sure are fresh~”

“If they weren’t I would have to question what kinda nincompoop is the chef!”

He kicks his feet.

“It’s a lot of work, feeding an army. But you do get special treatment on that front.”

“Getting real tired of being treated as special, honestly.”

Though, in this place? Maybe she isn’t.

Sometimes she smells blood.

Two of the kids that used to be in the rotation to care for her have died.

“You should be friendly with whoever comes to replace me as your conversation partner~”

She blinks.

“What? Are they going to card you or-”

He laughs, then shakes his head.

“No, silly! Don’t jump to conclusions!”

“Well, excuse me if I was worried for a second there, what with this place being a glorified kid meat grinder and all!”

“No need to be so disrespectful~ But, I’m going to go on an extended mission.”

“I thought there was a minimum age to join the Obelisk Force?”

That’s something she learned from him. The organization of some ranks. How he was basically set up to join the elites when time came.

How his time in the spotlight would last three years at most before, as he’d put it, having to be put away with all the other old toys for discarding.

“Yeah, yeah, but I requested a special job. Can’t be giving you the details of it~ But I still wanted to let you know, just in case they assign someone much more boring and much less cute than me.”

“You are so full of yourself that sometimes I wonder how you haven’t just burst yet.”

He pouts.

“Maybe I should have just left without a word, then!”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t actually. But that’s just because I’ve been meaning to ask you something and, it’d be pretty complicated to do that with you gone on vacation.”

“Vacation, pft. Whatever, you can ask away. Try not to ask anything stupid.”

You bring your legs up on the bed, hugging onto them. He is next to you, relaxed, as had been the norm for a little while now.

“What are you hiding from?”

“Excuse me?”

But his voice has gained an edge.

“I always found it weird that a self proclaimed elite student like you would take on a role like this. Everyone else who comes by has the red uniforms- slifer, right? So. Why would you come here for? Why would you actually ask to get to spend time here? You never even pushed me for information on Synchro beyond what I was comfortable giving you, so you didn’t really gain any- strategy stuff for Academia-” The words are kind of jumbled. Much less cutting and to the point than they were in your head before tonight.

“So. Are you hiding from something here?”

He pauses.

The silence is impossibly heavy.

“Rin-chan.” Serious. Plain. Detached and distant. “Have you ever asked my name?”

…

“No.”

“But you are asking something pretty big now. About me. When you look my way, that’s a duel soldier you are looking at, before anything else. Something that isn’t a person in the same way you might be.”

What’s this?

“I’ve been playing nice with you. Didn’t try to get anything out of you, even though you’ve been trying your hardest to get something out of me. If I told you what you want to know, though, I’d be playing an emotional manipulation card the size of the moon. I’d rather be more subtle than that, really.”

It’s that expression on anyone else. The one like a chained dog.

The one like someone far away from themselves.

“I’m just the person here to talk to you. Enrichment in your enclosure. Same as the bookshelves and blankets. Up until now, you were glad to see it that way, weren’t you?”

Because you are trapped here.

And you need to get out.

“Don’t make that kind of upset expression, Rin-chan. I’m not mad at you or anything. I did just give you all the answer you could hope for, didn’t I? But tell me. Would knowing the things I haven’t told you about yet make you think any differently?”

“...I, don’t think so. But, even then! There’s so much stuff in here that is, just fucked up, just wrong- I worry-!”

“You pity me. And you want me to help you get out. This isn’t personal at all.”

He says it matter of factly.

It’s true. It really is.

You want to go home. You want to speak to Yugo again. To have fun together and dream dreams larger than life. You want to bicker over trivial things, you want to be able to complain about his latest carefree nonsense. You want to be held back from starting up a fight by him. You want to enthuse about finding a house with warm water, still. You want to visit the institution where you grew up to teach kids to duel again. You want to run, you want to scream at the top of your lungs. You want to go home. You want to go home.

You want to look up at the crisscrossed skies.

This place is hateful and so, you hate.

Hate the bed. The food. The warmth. The conversations.

You hate it all.

But you asked that question anyway.

You look at the floor, wishing you could burn a hole right through it the way tears are burning in your eyes.

“...Just let me go.”

He stands up, crossing his arms behind his head.

“I can’t. I won’t. Unfortunately, the next person is also not going to let you go, either. In that way, we become interchangeable.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Well, if you wanna believe it’s gonna be any different with the next one, you are free to get disappointed~ But, for what it’s worth, it’s been nice talking to you, Rin-chan.”

That’s not what you meant. That’s not it.

And so, he heads for the door.

“Wait-”

“Don’t worry. It’s like I said. I’m not mad. It’s natural that a prisoner wants to escape.”

The door closes.

You feel so stupid. And so weirdly cruel, despite being the one stuck in a room. That person is still nameless. The world is still outside. Everyone is still bleeding, here and everywhere. The window still opens onto the infinite darkness of the ocean.

When was it that you started hoping you could be friends?

-- Hands --

You would never act like this in real life. Not at all. It’d be beyond embarrassing to be taking a dream this seriously about something so dire. It’d be cruel.

Just cruel.

But here? In this grey velvet room, sitting among proxies and toys and impossible things and reminders of what life was like before the war?

It’s different.

You can be that much more irrational, that much more hopeful.

It’s been months now since Ruri’s disappearance. There’s no clues about what happened- she was last seen among the people who went to adjust the cover in that building. The one place where Academia dares not stick its nose.

The house of something that shouldn’t have been uncovered.

Everyone else who went that day was found in pieces.

“You’ll be able to look for her soon, you know”, speaks the Ringmaster.

That has been his promise all this time, unwavering in its certainty, as though it could see into the future somehow with those golden eyes of its. A part of your brain aware of more than the conscious self, a part of this sad room that is much too large for you.

“Soon, soon, but never soon enough. I’m getting tired of this. Why can’t you just tell me where the hell Ruri is?”

“It wouldn’t be right.”

“Wouldn’t be-”

You grit your teeth and, without thinking, end up picking up the heftiest thing nearby and chucking it into the darkness around the Ringmaster. The toy train hits the ground, passing straight through the apparition.

“It’s fine for you to make a mess here. Don’t worry. You don’t have a choice but being patient.”

“We’ve looked for her everywhere.”

“Everywhere you know of.”

“I just need to know she’s okay. That she somehow survived.”

Bits of people strewn like tinsel around a christmas tree. There had been some kind of explosion, light, laughter. The cover was blown back. Little animals sat in dark corners, unnameable. Torsion, something that just broke like a dam, a nauseating smell.

“You know she did. What use is my reassurance then? You won’t even give it to your friend, won’t even share it.”

That would be too much. Shun, I heard it in my dreams that she’s okay. That we just need to be patient.

It would hurt him like a knife and you’d likely get kicked for your trouble. No, no, you can’t share this, it has to stay in the room.

“You wouldn’t understand it.”

“What will you do now?”

“Nothing. Enjoy my stay. Wait for some of the other proxies to disappear before I go.”

“Do they make you feel lonely?”

This question again.

“Sometimes.It mostly makes me wish I understood this dream. What it means, if it means anything at all”

“This place is walking after midnight.”

“That’s a reason to like it.”

Golden eyes glimmer.

“I’m glad you said that. Now, let me just, do one small thing- it is important, so that you’ll be able to understand things better.”

Huh?

The curtains close on the onlooker.

And-

A voice. An intruder’s voice, flooding in, flooding in, flooding in.

“Who?”

#yugioh #yugioh arc v #sakaki yuya

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