Chapter Text
Today was a day.
I dropped my phone, which cracked the screen; I missed my train to school; forgot my homework; my lunch was stolen by a bird; I tripped in the hallway and ended up flashing some people and then missed the last train home because I got into a fight with a now ex-friend, leaving me no choice but to walk home for the last 3 hours. Thank God for Goggle Maps, or I would be so lost. Except for the fact that for me to get home in the next 10 minutes, I'd have to go down some dark dingy alleyways as a shortcut or keep walking for another hour. And my tried-as-hell legs did not care about how dangerous it was to go down there at night, overriding my sense of self-preservation, so that I could just end this day faster.
So as I was walking down those alleys, I had begun to take note of my surroundings to satiate my sense of self-preservation, which had started to rear it's head back into my mind. It was actually pretty barren, just some bins, 2 dumpsters, and an oddly shiny metal trashcan with a blob of pink sticking out. A blob of pink?
My curiosity had taken the best of me, and when I had approached, I would not have denied my surprised scream of having believed that my luck was so bad today that I would have stumbled upon what I believed to be, in the moment, a corpse. So the relief I had felt when the presumed corpse had started to scream in surprise in response to my own was very much welcomed. But what wasn't welcomed was self-preservation going on about how it was right, and now we were faced with this trashcan-dwelling weirdo. Just let a girl risk her life! Like... damn!
Taking in this trash dweller had left me with an uncomfortable sense of familiarity, though it wasn't hard to figure out why. The long pink hair and a light pink faded tracksuit, pale skin, and a depressing aura followed by the smell of mold. Combining all of this with their long bangs, parted only by their nose and ending on the cheekbones, curtained their eyes from vision, leaving me to wonder how they could see, reminding me a little of Dad's.
That was when it had hit me.
…this trash dweller was the Phantom Guitarist!
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The Phantom Guitarist.
A cryptid, ghost, or just a homeless person, depending on who you ask, is something that first appeared on the internet around 10 years ago, debuting in two simple short videos that are hardly like the ones of the Phantom nowadays.
The first one was from a vlogger who caught the first streetside performance of the Guitarist before a policeman came rushing up, followed by the Guitarist dashing and vanishing into the crowd completely. The second video, a clip from a ghost hunting stream, follows two guys exploring an abandoned building before an ethereal, solemn voice begins to echo throughout the building, accompanied by the strumming of a guitar. And following the sound, they find the source of the song, the Phantom Guitarist. Sitting at the end of a hallway, strumming a Gibson and singing, before noticing the two men and letting out an inhuman scream. This causes the ghost hunters to flee, with the Phantom's scream echoing in the background. These two videos were taken in the Gunma Prefecture.
These two videos, while at the time, were quite hard to find due to the channels being quite small. But instead of being thrown into the abyss of the internet and lost to the sands of time, a short little horror story was written by someone who took inspiration from the videos, becoming the spark that lit the gas fire that was the Phantom Guitarist.
And the rest is history, with a fanbase bursting into the scene trying to find anything about the Phantom Guitarist any chance they could. Videos of people exploring abandoned buildings just to find them and pictures of the Phantom in very creepy positions/environments which, while the fandom collectively agreed that the Phantom Guitarist is probably just some homeless person but treated them like an actual cryptid, completely threw into question on whether or not they were actually just a human with how unnaturally easy they slip into the dark or when caught by surprise, they do some impossible thing like pop like a balloon or turn to ash. So nowadays, the fandom is divided into two groups: the 'just a human' faction and the 'actually a cryptid' faction.
5 years into the craze, people were tracking the Phantom travelling from the Gunma Prefecture to the Tochigi, Ibaraki and finally to the Chiba Prefecture with a large group of other homeless making camps. The Phantom Guitarist just seemed to have disappeared; the other homeless in the group the Phantom travelled with refused to give away any information about her for her privacy but unintentionally revealed that the Phantom was a woman. Which led to some rather perverted fans and fan works.
Until two years ago, 3 years after her disappearance, the Phantom came back doing a street performance in the Kanagawa Prefecture. The Phantom Guitarist no longer appearing in abandoned buildings, just does street concerts and was no longer chased off by police. She also wasn't looking like she was homeless anymore, being more clean and well-kept. Still wearing the faded pink tracksuit, but had tied her long hair into a low ponytail starting below the shoulders, with the hair below the tie fading from pink to black and her eyes covered by a long, thick curtain of bangs.
In the last two years, the Phantom Guitarist went from a mildly famous internet cryptid to a full-on mini-celebrity. And now that celebrity cryptid is jittering infront of me inside of a trashcan.
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So as the shock of coming face-to-face with a celebrity wore off and the jittering calmed down, the Guitarist looked at me while I just stood there awkwardly, red beginning to tint my cheeks, no doubt. She muttered
''F-Futari...?''
I freeze in place cause well...
HOW DOES SHE KNOW MY NAME!?
''I-It's m-me, Hitori.''
All the colour in my face no doubt disappears as I take her in again, and as she moves her bangs a little and the slightest tinge of blue shines through the curtain, the sense of familiarity shows me the truth it had missed before. She is not just the Phantom Guitarist; this woman is...
Hitori Gotou.
My missing sister.