Participants:
| Scene Title | Truth and Punishment, Part I |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Akado Ichihara sets into motion the plan he has been preparing… |
| Date | May 17, 2010 |
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A generator rumbles noisily nearby, hanging lighting flickers as it sputters once before normalizing again. Situated in front of a roaring fire pit, a darkly dressed man bundled in thermals and arctic survival gear ducks his head down to stare into the glow of the fire. Reflection of dancing flames in the black eyes of Akado Ichihara are more than just an image of the flame, it is a visual embodiment of what lies behind his eyes, a fiery passion and heat that has not burned out.
Blinking his eyes repeatedly, as if just waking from sleep, he begins to rise up from his cross-legged position in front of the fire, looking up to the hole in the ceiling where the smoke issues into, a collapsed floor above and a floor above that, all gutted and ruined by fire years ago. There's a new building above and beyond this one, built on the same lot, but they never repaired this structure, never refurbished it, left it like Midtown is; a scar, a reminder.
Hubris is what brought this place down, and it is hubris that will bring its foundations down further if Akado Ichihara has any say. Turning his back to the fire, he looks to the back of this old basement room, past the fire-damaged ceiling tiles serving as a floor, past the heat-warped furniture and buckled filing cabinets to a chalkboard cracked down the middle.
Names are written, a single column of descending importance:
Andre Perez
Robert Ferguson
Jeremy Woo
Berk Donahue
Jamie Wu
Hsiu-Mei Park
Sebastian Shell
Albert Paulson
Tim Pope
Martin Crowley
Akado Ichihara
Bob Bishop
Angela Petrelli
Breathing in deeply, Akado reaches in to his pocket and withdraws a piece of chalk, worn down to a stub now. As he approaches the board, there's sour dissatisfaction on his face, nothing like triumph, something bitter and jaded. The chalk line comes up next to Martin Crowley's name, then drags in a sharp line across it as his brows furrow.
"Soon," there's a gravity to Akado's words, spoken aloud more as oath than for the empty walls to hear him, "soon I will make right what I did to you both…" Swallowing anxiously after he speaks those words, Akado drops the piece of chalk onto the floor and turns alowly, looking to where he has propped up an old cork board with a crumpled photograph of his wife Li holding their then baby daughter Hokuto in her arms.
His eyes glass over, cast to the side, and then the black of his irises and pupils wavers and grows, expanding to swallow the whole of his eyes…