*Can I hear Ren's voice before we hang up? I'd like to at least know that he's conscious.* Rekka's voice replaced Shry's as she asked with continued concern, slightly shaky as fear began to sink in.
Hearing Rekka's request, Haze took his eyes off the phone for a moment and took a glance at Ren to check on him.
Fortunately, the sight was to his expectation. Ren hadn't moved from where he was standing, and his condition seemed to be getting better as well, looking at his now more vibrant complexion.
"Ren, come over here; your sister thinks you're dead." Haze called for Ren, half joking about the actual statement Rekka made.
"Huh... no, I'm not dead!" Ren's reaction was delayed before he unconsciously raised his voice in mild panic.
Quickly, Ren uncharacteristically snatched his phone out of Haze's hand, bringing the microphone close to his mouth.
"I am alright, Rekka; we'll be coming soon." Ren quickly uttered, his hands continuously stumbling around, almost accidentally hanging up the call.
Next to Ren, Haze made a slightly peeved face, but as he looked at Ren, he felt sadness. Sympathy rose within him as the kid who's usually tough and outspoken with unbreakable morals, with his true colors revealed, as a shy and jumpy kid.
"I am going to the car; jump in once you're done," Haze stated before turning around so Ren couldn't see his face twist into a pitying look.
...
After a short and kind of disconnected conversation with his sister, Ren hung up his phone and made his way into the front seat of Haze's car, ready to ask questions about the old world ruins.
"Mr. Haze, what did you mean by the ruins of the old world?" Ren spoke in smooth succession, his speech beginning to return back to normal.
For a moment, after hearing Ren's question, Haze really wanted to ask a question himself, a question about the boy on the phone who knew about the Rejection Phenomenon, but he restrained himself, feeling that he might revert the progress Ren made by reminding him about what did this to him.
Even after that, Haze took his time to answer Ren's question, getting back into his driver mindset before he finally answered Ren after leaving him hanging for almost 5 minutes.
"As you know, after the Slette, we grandly named the APOCALYPSE, which left humanity with less than a quarter of their land and people. It was deemed impossible to regain what we now call the old world." Haze added a healthy amount of irony.
Taking a breath, Haze took a moment to regain some of the focus he lost so they don't crash.
"Before the APOCALYPSE, Slette, some places had already been taken by several other Slettes, which preserved them, creating archeological sites for us to dig through and discover more about our ancestors and old science" Haze continued, explaining it to Ren in simple terms.
"Have you ever been to one?" Ren asked, intrigued by the prospect of seeing the near-fantasy old world they've learned about in their history classes.
"Kinda... The ones I've been to are definitely from the old world's era, but they were all after APOCALYPSE Slette. But looking at it was almost like looking into a different civilization" Haze answered, vaguely describing what he saw and comparing it to the architecture of their world.
"Did you guys find any cool things, like an old science device or book?" Ren continued asking more questions, curious while imagining all kinds of foreign and over-exaggerated relics from the fantasy media he consumes.
Thinking back to the time he traveled to a newly recovered portion of the old world, Haze remembered that, despite how foreign-looking the structures were, everything they found felt more like going to a different continent and seeing their cultural differences than some ancient lost civilization with mysterious engravings.
"Some old science researchers found some intriguing stuff for their research, but all I really saw were just a bunch of outdated new science devices and machinery," Haze stated as he racked his brain, trying to think of something interesting he found.
As Haze continued thinking about that time, he suddenly remembered a piece of news that he forgot.
After a month of scouring and picking apart everything like an actual archeology site, they didn't find a single book belonging to the old world, which raised alarm bells that blared conspiracy.
"I'm not really sure why; maybe they may have miscalculated the true era of those ruins, but... they've never found any books from the old world, not even a single note pertaining to our lost history" Haze added.
...
"What is the rejection phenomenon? I haven't heard about it before." Rekka said to herself loudly, her right hand on her cheek, tapping the side of her ear with her index finger, clearly as a sign to Shry.
When Shry, who was sitting by Rekka's side, heard this, his face lit up, and immediately, he dug into his backpack to pull out a mildly old notebook.
"Oh! It's what happens when a person who has an Origin Phrase finds out about its true nature," Shry jovially answered, giving out only the surface-level information while he flipped through his notebook, presumably trying to find the notes he had on the subject.
Hearing that, Rekka's face began to darken as an unsettling feeling began to bubble up.
In discomfort, Rekka egged Shry on to explain and paint the full picture of the situation to her so she could get the unfiltered explanation.
"What does that mean?" Rekka asked as she plastered on a smile to hide her fear.
"it'ssss....." Shry stretched on his answer, feeling that he was close to the page he'd been searching for, before finally stopping as he pinned his finger on the roughly written notes that provided him with the relevant information to jog his memory.
"The instinctual response to finding out that your Origin Phrase is manipulating your thoughts and actions" Shry read out the notes he wrote word for word.
"Huh!" Rekka dazedly said, not expecting the answer she got.
"I-I... Uh, will it hurt Ren?" Rekka, speechless, defaulted to a generic question, stuck and mortified by the truth.
Hearing Rekka's question, Shry tapped the top of his lip, his signature gesture when he's contemplating.
"I'm not sure; all I know is that they fight their Origin Phrase, and if they win... then something very bad would happen... Or could happen" Shry explained, his voice turning more hesitant as he muttered the second-to-last entry in his notes, saving the last entry for last.
"There are multiple things that can happen; it could end with complete memory loss, zombification, crippling or even death. It depends on how the recipient responds to the phenomenon. I don't really know what that means, though." Shry revealed, as well as admitting that he has no idea about how it works.
With this information laid out for Rekka, she was shocked; never would she have expected that the miracle that saved hundreds of thousands of people would bring such a huge consequence with it.
"That is insane... Ah!" Rekka stumbled backward, almost falling off her chair in the process.
"Woah!" Shry exclaimed as well, his hands sticking over the table, seemingly ready to catch his cousin despite being nowhere near.
"Now that's insane," Shry joked after seeing that Rekka was fine.
"Shry, your drink!" Rekka exclaimed, continuing the chain of disasters.
When Shry was going back down, he accidentally shook the table too much, and as a result, his cup of mysterious concoction tumbled and fell sideways, and contrary to the expected outcome, when the cup toppled sideways, none of the liquid spilled or even moved; it just sat there as still as hardened cement.
On the table, there were 2 drinks. One was normal, a caramel drink with chocolate syrup splattered inside the cup. The other cup, however, was much less presentable, a crime against free will; it had 3 visually ugly colors stacked on top of each other, each with a different texture.
"... Can I try some?" Rekka was speechless for a moment, but her curiosity got the better of her.
"Sure, but it's extremely sweet, like pure sugar... Hehehe, I'm never making that again." Shry laughed as he proudly looked at the kiosk, specifically at the now emptied syrup pumps.
Getting Shry's permission, Rekka tried to reach the drink that rolled to the other end of the table while sitting down, but her hands were too short, so she stood up and reached over the table for it, carefully lifting it upright with both hands.
"How did you convince them to do this?" Rekka said as she shook the cup, trying to slosh around the liquid.
Without answering Rekka, Shry simply turned to face her, and in the next moment, his lips slowly and progressively got wider and wider, causing Rekka to impulsively look away.
"Do you want to try my drink? I can guarantee that. It's good." Rekka muttered, feeling bad for pretty much stealing Shry's drink.
Bringing Shry's drink close to her mouth, Rekka prepared herself for the worst, working herself up to start sucking in the concoction, harder and harder, until a nib of the concoction finally made it to her tongue.
"Ehmmm! ehemmm? I like it." Rekka widened her eyes in pleasant surprise.
"Uhh... What?" Shry, bewildered, could only mutter a word in confusion.
Shry imagined all kinds of reactions Rekka would make when she finally tasted it, but he never anticipated that she'd react positively to it.
Almost like that wasn't surprising enough, after saying that, Rekka continued to sip on the concoction, enjoying each drop of the absurdly sweet nectar.
Uncharacteristically, Shry shivered and showed a rare face of repulsion.
He tried it before, and it only took around 5 sips for him to abandon the drink despite having a pretty prominent sweet tooth himself.
"How are you enjoying that? I could barely suck it out of the straw." Shry couldn't help but ask in astonishment.
"I really like sweet stuff. Try mine; I'm sure you'll like it." Rekka dismissed Shry's question, excitedly pushing her drink to Shry with no hesitation.
With that said, Shry naturally took the drink, which was already a quarter empty. He took a sip, and immediately a strong scent of caramel with minor hints of saltiness overpowered his taste buds, leaving a strong milky aftertaste as it departed.
Although the drink wasn't completely aligned with Shry's taste, the drink was way better than expected. Part of him was ready to taste a sugary monstrosity because of the demonstration of Rekka's newly discovered preference for absurdly sweet things.
...
After that, neither one of them spoke; they both just sat there peacefully drinking the other's drink while doing their own thing under a comfortable silence as they waited for Ren and Haze to arrive.
Continuing to read through his notes regarding the Origin Phrase, Shry got more and more intrigued by the phenomenon, especially after getting confirmation that it actually exists.
Now, all he could feel was regret, regret that he didn't pursue more information about it from his mentor.
On Rekka's side, however, she was really enjoying the concoction, to the point where she's obsessed with it.
It was like the conversation about the lethality of an Origin Phrase never happened, because despite how deep their conversation went and how dim the mood was before, like a light switch, the vibe around them flipped after Shry knocked over his drink.
"Oh! They've arrived." Shry jumped out of his seat excitedly.
"Huh! Where?" Rekka almost spit out her drink in surprise.
Seeing where Shry was looking, Rekka quickly turned her head over to the same direction as well; however, she was only met with an empty road.
Rekka squinted her eyes, trying to find any semblance of a car; it was only after 10 seconds that something within the scene changed.
Entering just around the corner was a familiar car. Although the people in the car were still imperceptible to Rekka, she was very familiar with whose car it was, since she had seen it numerous times while working as a receptionist.