Chloe

Chloe always wears a custom-made eyepatch over her right eye, a device crafted by the Citadel known as "Leaf." It serves as a barrier that seals off the Unbewusstes, preventing others from glimpsing its depths and descending into madness. Though she often delights in terrifying anyone curious enough to ask about it, she has never once removed it before another person.

That hidden eye is both her gateway to the Unbewusstes and the source of her power as an Angel. Katas once remarked that the eyepatch made her seem mysterious and overwhelming, dubbing it the "Unseeable Evil Eye." The name caught on, and before long, everyone was calling it the same.

The phrase unseeable carries another meaning as well. It is not only that no one should look into the eye—it is that Chloe herself can no longer truly look upon humanity. Bound to the Unbewusstes, the eye has left her with severe perceptual impairment. To her, most people appear as indistinguishable masses of chaos, their individual forms dissolved beyond recognition. Only a rare few can still be perceived as they truly are.

After an agonizingly long period of adaptation, Chloe eventually learned to identify people through fragments of incomplete information. Yet the process is itself an act of reduction: lives stripped down into symbols, transformed into data that can be classified and processed. In adapting to the eye, she gradually lost any genuine sense of human individuality.

After making countless trips between the Eternal and Senanonic, Chloe decides it's about time she claims a corner of the train for herself. She sets her sights on a forgotten storage compartment at the very rear of the train, empties it without so much as asking, and stuffs it with her own belongings.

A cushion. A projector. A shelf crammed with cheap, low-budget film reels. That is the entirety of Chloe's room. The flickering light cast across the wall by the projector is the only illumination the compartment ever knows.

Chloe neither eats nor sleeps. Between assignments, she can spend entire days inside this tiny room—sometimes sitting cross-legged on the cushion, sometimes simply drifting in midair—expressionless as one film gives way to the next. She can remain like this for days at a time. Curiously, these are also the rare moments when she is at her quietest.

Grand productions and critically acclaimed masterpieces hold little appeal for her. Instead, Chloe has a particular fondness for cheap B movies. Her own life is, after all, a cruel black comedy. Art films striving for profound beauty, or prestige dramas celebrating lofty ideals, strike her as unbearably dull. The shameless absurdity of low-budget cinema, by contrast, reflects the world with far greater honesty. Rather than watching someone labor to present a carefully crafted "deeper meaning," she'd much rather enjoy the glorious chaos of a truly terrible film.

"Seriously, what's with all the yappin'? It's just a B movie. Ya gonna turn this into a thesis or what? Never seen ya work this hard on your reports."
— Chloe (Recorded at her own insistence. The original wording has been suitably sanitized.)

The moment the passage opened, Haima Zaria fell into absolute silence. Her consciousness was cleanly severed from flesh and bone. The world bled of all color, dissolving into nothingness as dim beacons pierced her awareness, pulling her downward... deeper... ever deeper.

At first, there was only silence. Then came a resonance beyond sound itself, an indescribable hum that echoed directly within the depths of consciousness. Vast. Ancient. Indifferent. It did not observe, because it was observation itself. It did not think, because it was thought itself.

The darkness began to writhe.

The first fragments of information flooded her mind.

This is "humanity"—not individuals, nor civilization, but the ultimate convergence of every consciousness, past, present, and future, woven together beyond time itself.

It held neither malice nor mercy. Only an irresistible instinct, as inevitable as the pull of a black hole: assimilation.

It reached for her, seeking to dissolve the boundaries of her consciousness, to free her from the very notion of self, so that she, too, might become part of this chaotic sea. She would inherit every fragment of knowledge, every emotion, every memory, every history. And in return, she would lose herself.

At the deepest reaches of her soul, all her hatred and rejection of humanity erupted into a bolt of pure negation, tearing open a single crack within the chaos—a place that belonged only to "I."

"No!"

The word cut through the abyss with absolute conviction. For an instant, she was back upon that perilous wilderness once more, running as she always had, a tiny spark of lightning dancing in the palm of her hand.

Faster. Farther. At last, she escaped.

She was no longer a part of the sea, but a solitary observer standing forever at the edge of the abyss, gazing into its depths. She had witnessed the whole of reality, and in doing so, had forever lost the way home.
—Adapted from the fantasy novel "***** in Wonderland".

"Holy s***! I f****** wrote this! You goddamn plagiarizin' bastard, pay me my f****** royalties!"
—The remarks of a certain unnamed Angel.