[He walks casually besides her, but keeps his ears and nose peeled for signs of unwanted attention.]

I thought about putting something up in a public space and see if it makes it through the night.

More like graffiti. But something you can pass off as art or decorations, not just vandalism.

[He shuts the door quietly. But he can hear, just around the corner...]

Quick, someone's coming.

Make us write lines? Call our "parents?" I doubt they'd care.

[Vanessa hates the forced domesticity almost as much as he does, and Mizu acts like the whole thing is beneath him. Natsuno doesn't rule out more severe punishments, but those are likely to occur after repeated offenses and besides, it's only reasonable for newcomers to push boundaries.

The footsteps fade away and once the coast is clear, Natsuno turns the other corner to where the bicycles are parked.]

You got a bike?

Guess it's meant to be an essential of the essential kid experience, or something.

[His own bicycle is like his old ones from back home, white with a basket. They don't constantly get flat like the old ones, though. The roads here are better maintained than Sotoba's, but both lead to nowhere.]

So. Wanna go deface a wall?

[He nods and hops on the bike, riding towards the aquarium. His backpack is stuffed not with books, but with spray paint.]

Normal's relative. [For him it was going to school and resenting his parents. For Clarke, it was a deteriorating space station.] I used to ride a bike to get around, but this... I don't think it's anyone's normal. It's there because that's how it goes in American tv shows.

Yeah.

[Natsuno resented Aurora's attempts to personalize Etraya, as if familiar locations would make the forced "missions" any better. But Eos' design, with its family units and constant tasks, is worse.]

Etraya's fake too, but at least they leave us alone between "missions."

I don't get how they tolerate this crap. Especially when they to fight each other. It's bad enough to be trapped with someone killed you the other week -

[And unfortunately, he knows exactly how it feels to be stuck in a limited space with people who brutalized him and worse, his friends.]

But play family with them?

[He glances at her. Oh yeah, people aren't usually so blase about it.]

Not in Etraya, but yeah. [His voice is as deadpan as ever.] Several times.

[This time it's more than a glance, a full turning off the head before he has to focus back on the road ahead. She could be making a general statement, but... is it just him, or there's a certain knowing weight behind her words?]

It's not. [Painful at times, or scary, or just an annoyance he needed to get over with. Never fun, even at that dark time when Natsuno welcomed death as freedom.] But it's not the worst part.

[His tone is still calm, but a bit more serious. Gone is the casual disregard.]

It's the revival that sucks the most. Knowing the consequences.

Yeah. Seeing what happens after. How it made the people you left behind feel.

[That was the worst part, what made him decide he'll try to find value in an undead existenxe. He couldn't bear to see the anger and grief in everyone's faces.]

[Ah, he thinks, another one from the apocalypse. Natsuno's still surprised at how many of the people he's met faced such awful stakes in their worlds.]

If the world ends, then I guess you're right. But my world didn't. [Sotoba was just one tiny village. People probably forgot all about it within a month.] People around got hurt, but the rest of the world moved on.

I've been on both sides. Sucks either way.

[He wonders if he went too far. It's hard to remember that his feelings on the matter aren't what most people consider normal. She wanted to ditch to do something better with her time, right?]

...I didn't mean to bring down the mood. We don't have to keep talking about this.

...yeah. There's no point.

[He's not acting tough. He came to terms with it a long time ago.]

Your world really ended? And they still expect you to fight for that universe?