[ARC 21.5: OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD]
Morgan Haldvan was not a woman susceptible to thinking dogmatically, and this was where her difficulties began. She was born in 1988 or '87, though documentation around her birth would become scarce in later years, so she often passed herself off as young of a woman as required for her purpose: as a host, she would not have had her first wrinkle until around age 75. She remained someone who wanted answers and was rarely wholly pleased upon receiving them; had she not been born with Aegis, she likely would have made a great physicist or astronomer.
Throughout highschool she had often wished she had been born some lesser-thinking automaton, for she was a loner and rarely related to her peers: similar to a Yuruko. She had become interested in Phantasmology once Aegis had activated, for the allure of its study's restriction to hosts and how little she could know about it made it all the more attractive to her. She felt that while the world needed functional men, like her geologist, there was an opportunity for her by attending Urasaria: only later would she realize it.
She began attending in 2005, and with her precociousness as a student followed contrarianism; she held a particular dislike for her fellow research students, and as they began to drop our from the difficulty of the program, she had made judgments in her first-year that became her habitual view of humans. It was not so much that she despised humanity, more that she thought herself mostly outside of it; she felt that she was the rare person who had needed to be born, the scientist who cared beyond knowledge and needed to ripple through the cosmos.
Mere knowledge was not what Morgan wanted for herself, however, nor impartiality. No great philosopher she, she often came across ideas and concepts that she needed to spread her mental essence over to properly devour. Her connection to reality had thickened enough that all the blackheads of live were beginning to be visible to her; all the malice of hosts and death that have thus been relayed; it all informed Morgan's beliefs and actions, which seemed a thing of necessity to her mind. She knew that Revenants were a net negative upon the world and that she needed to cure them.
But to do so she knew she could never suggest such a project openly. No, Morgan trusted and was loyal only to herself. She had looked into the affairs of other countries' academies, and half-distorted as the interpretations often were, she came to know many of the various clandestine atrocities that Revenants had, if not made possible, certainly amplified.
Had she ever looked into American affairs, she would have known that America's federal agencies often contracted hosts specifically to poach or kill hosts with promising Revenants in developing countries, or similar work to China's Ningsing Academy's strikebreakers & unionbusters. She might even have found that American agencies occasionally contracted certain students out for work in other countries. This was usually done to test competence for later federal work or to ensure loyalty through blackmail, and this novel shall later deal with the assassination of a democratically-elected president in South America for such reasons.
By the time she graduated, her position had solidified, and she felt an obligation to cure Revenants or develop a method to instantly kill hosts. She had become one of only a few hundred Revenant researchers in the world, and she knew that this came with constant surveillance. Her years of investigations had given her the ability to exploit the trust of others without them being aware of it, and after she had convinced her professor to give her Xenocyclin's formula, six months before graduation, she had already begun experimenting ways she might synthesize it herself.
(Xenocyclin is the only antibiotic proven to work on the bacterial colonies of Viscera exspiravit: Revenants. Informally referred to as a Schedule 0 compound, knowing its formula without authorization is a federal crime, and one dealt with as any other host-related crime.)
While she could have weaponized it using Aegis (in a way Yuruko will later copy), she saw no point in leaking the formula to random criminals and seeing what they may do with it. She despised causing futile chaos, and hated both terrorism & the government operations that funded & implicitly invited it. If was always the civilians who bore the consequences of these incursions, and never those who profited from it.
And it should be noted her that while Morgan was not the first to think to cure Revenants, she would make the most progress towards it. Just as Magnus Egashira's Scourge allowed him to examine Revenants while still nourished by their hosts, advantaging him in creating Worldwide's conduits, a particular ability of Aegis's advantaged Morgan's study as well. Most governments had already floated the idea before, yet it was considered too risky; and as you have likely guessed before, the beloved legal-immunity of students is for the benefit of the state and not themselves.
So Morgan began planning her escape from surveillance before graduation, yet was still unable to by the summer. Now living a few hours from Urasaria and receiving a minor stipend, she heard a knock at her apartment door and answered it to someone she did not know. After some exchange of words and call back to Urasaria, Morgan verified that this was a federal agent, and invited them inside to interview her: though she suspected every question she was asked, they already knew the answer.
[---]: Now, on to your personal relationships. Have you kept in touch with your former mentor, [-----], or protege?
MORGAN: No, I haven't, not since my second year. I would see both of them around campus every once in a while, but we would just say hello to each other. I wasn't too upset with that arrangement.
[---]: Do you have any past or current acquaintances? Lovers?
MORGAN: No. No ... lovers, current or former.
[---]: Just to make this clearer: I don't mean romantic lovers. I understand this is a personal question, but it's important that you answer honestly. It can be anyone you ever went on a date with, had a relationship with, sex, anything like that. I'm even including the types of girls you don't like to remember, because it makes you feel a bit immature.
MORGAN: Is there a particular reason you're so insistent I must have dated someone? I was studying almost constantly in my third and fourth year -- I wouldn't have been able to find anyone suited to that sort of lifestyle.
[---]: Well, it's just a little surprising to me, mostly. When I was going to Urasaria, I felt I couldn't go three days without hearing about who was fucking who or who was dating who now. Once you join an agency, by the way, that type of gossip doesn't stop, either.
MORGAN: Well, certainly, I was aware of things like that, but I never actually took part in any of it. I was mostly a loner, actually. I could have been popular if I needed to be, but it would've felt like I was betraying myself, a bit.
[---]: That's an interesting choice of words -- if you needed to be. If you could have been, why weren't you?
MORGAN: Because I couldn't connect with people as deeply as I wanted to. I can bullshit about sports or things like that, but I don't truly care about it. I'm not someone who enjoys faking anything, really. I'd rather let my teeth sit in a jar and grow old than be with someone I despise. Honestly, this is probably the most conversation I've had this year.
[---]: It's fine by me. If it makes you feel any better, you aren't the first researcher I've talked to who has those sorts of feelings, either. I had someone tell me that they wished they were some… automaton, some robot or something like that, was the word they used. Have you felt like that?
MORGAN: Not particularly, no. I usually understand myself very well, and why I am the way that I am. Actually, if I had to sum up how I would describe myself, I wouldn't say anything about robots at all -- I would still be a scientist, watching colonies of bacteria trying to spread themselves over certain nutrients, or certain things they barely understood. I don't despise people, but I mostly face inward. A friend in need at this point in my life would just be a pest.
[---]: Ah, you're an intellectual type.
MORGAN: I suppose, but universities don't churn out people like me.
[---]: Well, I'm sure you'll still fit right in wherever you decide to work. Most of you researcher types spend hours in a lab by yourself, usually. Now, speaking of that, you told your professor before you graduated that you would be taking a private sector job, not one with the government. Any particular reason why?
MORGAN: It pays better.
[---]: I wish I could say you're wrong. And you're aware of the restrictions?
MORGAN: I'm aware. Any findings need to be reported to the US government before publishing. Actually, I assume it'll probably be the Irish government -- I've started looking towards applying to [------------]. It's a private agency, only ten employees, and they were looking for a researcher.
[---]: I thought they worked in the U.S..
MORGAN: They do. They're headquartered in Ireland for tax reasons. They said they can fly me over for an interview in a month or so, once they finish the paperwork.
The interviewer asked her several more questions, and left after telling Morgan she would need to notify the government -- Irish or American -- of any changes. They would never receive any updates; Morgan had already been researching the airline she would be taking to Ireland, as well as the models of passenger plane she would be taking, so as to ensure her escape from it would harm no civilians.
"Aegis." she muttered, crouching down to the plane's bathroom floor. A swarm of bats planted themselves on the floor.
These were Aegis's explosives, and she refilled the hole she left after escaping through it. The rest of Aegis's bata carried her to a forest in rural Appalachia, where she lived for the next few months, and over the next year's, she frequently moved whenever she felt 'they' were near.
While she quickly assumed a new identity & work, she never moved outside of the States; she assumed the typical American incompetence in law enforcement travelled upwards to federal investigators, and indeed it did. She had destroyed all evidence at her former home with the exception of her computer, and using Aegis's precise manipulation of metal, she had rewritten the data on her hard-drives to a certain message for a computer forensic investigator.
The general fucking with law enforcement was a source of amusement for Morgan, though she soon began focusing on her primary goal and running experiments on what Revenants she could acquire; the content of which is a later topic. Without her access to new scientific articles, she was forced to rely on old copies she had written out beforehand; oftentimes she would independently and palely discover a supposed 'revolution' in the field in the process.
Yet her obligation continually stressed her, and she would often repeat her habit as a student of going to a park & watching the crows. As she was sitting on a bench, watching a group of them gather over something she couldn't see - a carcass of a small animal? - she remembered that they were called a 'murder' of crows, and chuckled to herself as an elderly man sat down next to her.
"Amazing, isn't it?" he said.
"What is?" said Morgan.
"You're watching them, aren't you?" He pointed over to the murder, where they seemed to be talking amongst themselves. "You know, there's this wonderful book my daughter bought for me, it talks all about local types of birds. These types of crows, here -- they migrate south every year, and they somehow always know how to come back to the same spot."
Morgan suspected he was a federal agent, so one of Aegis's bats formed in her left closed hand. "I've read about them before. They usually have an internal compass to guide themselves back."
"It's amazing. I've lived here for ten years, visited this park for all ten of them, but every year, that little group of crows comes back, right to this very spot. Alright, well, I'm not sure if it is the same group, but I like to think it is. After all, some of them can live up to fifteen years, and that's… nearly a quarter of my life. That's enough to make them as permanent as this park is, to me. Now, my memory is getting a little rust on it, but I remember first seeing them, too. And I also remember first seeing you."
"Seeing me?"
"Yes. You *are* that Urasaria student who would come here and watch them, too, aren't you? You may think just because I'm old that I wouldn't remember that, but I do. I certainly would remember seeing a Urasaria student doing something as mundane as watching crows."
Aegis's bat disappeared. "I guess you remember that right, but I don't see what you mean by mundane. Plenty of people birdwatch."
"Well, it wasn't that it was mundane, in-and-of-itself, but that it was interesting to see someone who should be out killing people -- killing criminals -- doing something like sitting on a park bench watching a bunch of birds flap about. I felt sure you had some reason for it, but I never did get to ask. Now, do you?"
"I'm not a hippie or anything like that. I don't come here because I think it makes me part of nature or anything. It's just something I became obsessed with, because I suppose that, in some off-hand way, I felt it related to questions I was starting to ask about myself."
"What kind of questions?"
"I was wondering why crows don't ask questions about themselves. Humans do, or some people do, but animals don't."
"Well, you're right that it's only some people. It sounds like you realized when you were young that most people don't ask any questions about themselves, or many questions at all, really. That's good."
Morgan frowned. "No, that isn't what I was asking. Why should people have to ask questions about themselves? A crow or a bumblebee, or a wasp, or anything like that doesn't have to ask itself why it lives a certain way. It doesn't have to think of why it exists, or what the meaning of its existence is."
He laughed. "If you're looking for that, you should have studied something like philosophy, not hunt down criminals."
"I shouldn't have. Philosophy didn't answer my actual questions, either. I've read enough of it." Morgan wiped her face. "Actually, when I first started reading people like that, it made me think about when I was still in highschool, and we all needed to take a class on economics. We had to spend an hour going over what money was, and why it existed." She hunched over. "But when I think back to it, none of it answered me then, either. I mean, at first I had the same questions everyone else does: about why some people have millions and others have nothing. But eventually, I started wondering why, if it's something we control or invented, why I needed a special teacher to explain it to me. They told us that people would… they would go off for four years to study how it actually worked. Four years for something we invented." She watched as a crow picked up a stick, then carefully prodded a hole in the ground. "Look at him. He understands exactly what he invented. He's catching a bug with it."
"Well, but that's only a stick. There's a reason why it isn't complicated. If I'm understanding you right, you're saying that everything should be as simple as a crow's life. But that's just not how the world can work. They have brains the size of a walnut, but we don't."
"I never said it should be simple, I said it should be directly understandable." she said. "Look at something like the law. I had to learn about it, a bit, when I was a student, because I was still running investigations. The supposed... the reason we invented the legal system was because we need some sort of law, but it takes years of law school to understand it. Most people are completely separate from the process of actually making it." She felt irritated over his simplicity remark, so added. "I was a Revenant researcher. I can handle complexity where it needs to be. Actually, I always liked chemistry and biology, because they had a reason for being complex. Something like finding out why the universe exists, even when that was billions of years ago -- that's complicated. I mean, there was that one news story about the first picture of a black hole, and I couldn't-- I'm intelligent, but I couldn't even begin to understand what went in to it. That's alright." She watched the crow pick its insect prey out, then peck at it. "Crows don't have psychologists, either. They don't have experts who have to tell them what they really think, or what their real motivations are. I still don't understand why we humans do."
He chuckled. "I'm not so sure they don't. They're intelligent little creatures. Not as intelligent as you or me, certainly, but they could speak all sorts of things we don't know about. They may have their own little society set up over there, with their own lawyers and therapists. Unlucky little bastards."
"But you were the one just saying to me that crows innately know how to live. I'm sure they have some biological reason, or maybe something evolutionary, for why they know how to migrate. What I keep asking is why humans don't have that, because as far back as I see it, the past six thousand years have shown that we don't know how to live properly. We went from having to figure out that it was wrong to sacrifice people to the Sun, or something, to knowing it was wrong to have a monarch, to finally figuring out whether it was wrong to own slaves or not. Actually, go over to China and you'll find out we still haven't figured that out, either, but everywhere in the world, we now have a society where superpowered criminals can go around and murder civilians as much as they like, until some superpowered legally immune teenager shows up and busts them open on a street corner. Do you not see how absurd that is? How miserable that is?"
"Well, but that's simply how life has to be now. If I understand you right, you seem to be asking for some perfect society, but that… that isn't anything that anyone can demand."
There was a habit Morgan had come to expect from men: to prattle on about whatever they wanted to first, not what the conversation dictated. "If you're not going to actually engage with what I'm saying, you can fuck off."
As he quickly stood up and walked away, not wanting to risk an angered host, she watched him loom in to the end of afternoon. She felt foolish afterwards. It was pointless to let her rage out like that: she understood it, and she wondered why she had done it. Perhaps because he had reminded of her professor, or that Morgan was not someone who took minor annoyances well. Sometimes she would even struggle falling asleep, as her past angers & embarrassments seemed to advance towards her like a too-luminous dream.
As she stood up from the bench, leaving the crows, she was brought back to her teenage years. While she was relatively unaffected by her parents' deaths in a car accident, shortly before she graduated Urasaria, she remembered once coming across a book of her poems her mother had accidentally left out. Upon looking over, Morgan saw that the page was turned to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, and it went:
'His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.'
Rilke's words had transported a feeling across time to her, and one she later recognized in herself.
In the lead-up to 2013, she moved from her preliminary study to identifying pathways she might be able to exploit. The technicalities are not important, but she made progress in extracting in extracting her own Volgari proteins and could eventually cultivate a Petri dish of Aegis's bacteria, allowing her to sustain a second external colony. By implanting this back in to herself, she was able to steadily increase in strength despite her lack of fighting, and these copies of Aegis later proved key in developing her suppressants.
Needing humans to experiment on, she would investigate the patterns of local serial killers and eliminate them, gratis. She made far better progress in this method, and never did she use innocents (including students). She gradually needed to seek out more experienced killers, as while she could eventually succeed at nearly destroying Revenants from hosts who had only been active for a month or two, she knew that even a host's first year saw their heart grow a hundred-fold times the bacteria.
Still, however poorly she treated federal agents, she had grown a special revulsion for misanthropes, and what connects many killers is the belief they are better than those they abuse.
She had once gone shopping for groceries when she heard a man's voice raise in the other aisle. She listened, and heard that he was berating the woman he was with. It irked Morgan enough that she decided to surreptitiously follow them, though she was uncertain if it was the woman's husband, father, or brother. As she stood in the checkout line behind them, she began to contemplate if it would be difficult to follow them home and relieve this woman of him in some way. It was not that Morgan necessarily thought the woman wanted him murdered, more that her extreme social isolation had left her to fester in her own host tendencies; she had developed no skills outside of Phantasmalogy and violence.
The man grumbled a bit more as they walked out together, and as Morgan passed by them to sit in her own car, she watched them sit in a convertible seated in a parking space across from her own. The man pulled out, and as their car drove away, Morgan could still see part of the woman's face in the rearview, a section of her that soon shrunk into the end of night.
It brought a memory back to Morgan of pulling out from her own driveway, a few nights prior. Only a few feet from her home, she had run over *something*, but she ignored it and continued driving, resolving that she would check it when she returned home. When she returned, she saw nothing near the spot she had hit it -- possibly a bit of blood, but nothing that allowed her to know what she had run over. Had it been a small animal who limped away to die? Uneven pavement or a pothole? Had someone left something in the road, then went out to grab it after it was crushed?
She had hesitated again, and this all gnawed at her as she returned home that night. These disparate memories when triggered together tease the human mind in to forming some sort of connection between them, even when their only commonality is the person through which they have been varnished. Morgan would eventually realize this, though this narrative is not yet there, and neither was she.
In early 2014, now renamed Catherine & working a job that did not look too closely in to her background, Morgan entered a local bar in a 2014 March to see an appearance she recognized, nursing his drink. She decided to sit next to this federal agent, introduced herself as Morganna, and as anyone who has ever met one knows, most straight men do not think lucidly when a beautiful woman approaches them. (Or lesbians, in the name of fairness.)
Morgan had suspected that the federal government was beginning to lose their edge towards her; not that they did not still hunt her, but rather that the task force assigned for her had steadily deteriorated from its 50-person height and was now left only with the employees no other department wanted. Yet despite her lesbianism, she needed to warm him up so that he might divulge his name (Kent), his job & investigation (both concerning her), and even a few leads she had not realized she had left.
Kent soon tried to regale her with tales of his 'glory days' at Urasaria, and as anyone who has ever met one knows, pathetic nostalgizing does not work on most straight women: let alone a lesbian.
"So, after every scumbag we dealt with, we always had to take their Revenant out, and you know, the weird thing is -- no one's ever figured out why they still keep beating like that. Really, you've got this heart and it just keeps beating unless you destroy it, completely."
"Well, it's rather simple." said Morgan. "Revenants have nearly a hundred thousand mitochondria per cell, and they keep their energy storage even after the host is dead. It's enough for thirty days without a host."
"That sounds about right. Jeez, you sound pretty smart on this stuff. You're not a student, are you?"
"I'm glad you think I look so young, but no, I'm not. I just like to read these boring books, mostly, and I try to observe people."
"Well, you sure are one woman I'd like to observe. Where are you from, anyway -- are you around here?"
"No. You might say that I'm a traveler, mostly, but I don't get out much. I mostly read, and I sometimes skydive. You know, they say that the first thirty five thousand feet isn't the problem - it's the last five." She looked over to the jukebox. It was playing some country song: she instinctually despised it, though she couldn't remember why. "Could you go change the music for me? Anything would be better than this crap."
"You got it, beautiful."
She rolled her eyes as he walked away, then held her over her drink. One of Aegis's bats flew in to it and refilled it with water. She wondered what the use was of an investigator who does not observe anything as he came back, and did not notice. "Much better."
"Oh, anything for you." he said. "I swear, I've never had a girl as pretty as you approach me before, never. Not ever."
"Oh, I'm sure. Now, what were you saying about your investigation, earlier?"
He nodded. "Well, as I was saying, we… we tracked her down to her apartment. Now, we knew -- or thought we did -- that she was involved with the mob--"
"--I meant the one about Morgan."
"I'll get to that soon, too, don't you worry. But, as I was saying, we go to her apartment - and we can't find nothing of her. Nothing, at all. No trace of her, no sign of a struggle, anything."
"You didn't think it was -- what's the word, foul play?"
"Well, maybe, but we got our answer the next day. She showed up swimming in the ocean. You know, she- she drowned. Drowned herself, too."
"Why?"
"Well, I think she was just tired of carrying her sins around. Hey, you aren't bothered by all this gross talk, are you? I mean, I know I can come off a little desensitized sometimes, but you don't seem to mind it at all."
Morgan shook her head. "No, you could say I'm also desensitized. Maybe even more than you, actually. But you were talking about how she drowned herself. How sure were you of that?"
Kent nervously laughed. "Well, hey, you don't have to be a genius to know when someone's done that to themselves. Her lungs were filled up with water, completely. Coroner said there's something that happens where the valves close off at a certain point, they don't let anything in anymore."
"Well, I'm not that smart, but it seems to me that doesn't necessarily mean she drowned." said Morgan. "Did the water in her lungs match the ocean's water? I mean, someone else could have drowned her, and it would have been far easier to do it in the middle of the night in her own bathtub. Then, it would be *that* water in her lungs, not the ocean's. Did you check to see if they match?"
"...well, no, we didn't. I'm sure we got it right, though. I mean, who would even think of something like… like that."
"Oh, I'm sure. I'm no investigator, though. I just have a good knowledge of killers and their habits. But I'm no investigator."
It is a truism of life, one that Morgan knew well, that most jobs are staffed by the type of people who forget the burger in your bag or the plumber who tries to stiff you, the sciolist on the street corner who pontificates on a great number of topics, but, once you grow a little & can challenge him, he immediately darts to a topic you know nothing about, so as not to expose himself a fraud. Federal agencies were no exception to this, and it all contributed to Morgan's confidence -- to call it arrogance would imply it was undeserved. No, Morgan had a reason for all that she did, even if sometimes only logical to herself.
Her most audacious move came in 2015 in deciding to attend an international conference of Revenant researchers, albeit one open to the public. (It was held in Germany, though as anyone has ever visited knows, there is no country more fluent in English than Germany.)
While there, marveling at all the inane questions reporters asked other researchers, she had decided to pose as a journalist and ask a few questions herself: this would allow her to gain some insight in to papers she could no longer access. Most of those she interviewed were overly eager in speaking about their field, allowing her to gain insight into some new advances in the science.
Still, she remembered one researcher she had spoken to. There were many times in her life where conversations simply ended or petered out, by occurrences like the aforementioned, but this tendency had not asserted itself here. There was an aura to him that words, abstractions they are, cannot fully encapsulate: it was something of his own person and purpose. Not all could recognize this, but Morgan felt it and respected it. This was why, although his work was the opposite of her own research, she remembered him as Mia does.
She would later be reminded of him near the end of 2016, as she begun dating a woman after feeling the need for some intellectual companionship. Her name was Ruth, though she only knew Morgan as Catherine. She was a biology graduate student at a local university: a topic Morgan knew well, and as stated earlier, she enjoyed speaking on subjects that had reasons to be complex, while despising the social sciences, whose hands made human matters seem alien -- even while she still had not figured out the answers to why it existed, or other queries she asked of the crows.
Still, she felt that it was only a matter of time before she would need to reveal her identity to Ruth, and lambasted herself for falling prey to some baser emotion in this way. She began worrying that if their relationship progressed, she might eventually need to do something to Ruth to prevent her from going to federal agencies if her connection was discovered. That Ruth could have no possible way of knowing Morgan's significance did nothing to assuage her paranoia, as it is an illogical dictator, and a dictator it often was to Morgan.
It was three weeks since they had met when Morgan was sitting in her own apartment, retreading over these thoughts alone, when one of her burner cellphones vibrated. The text of the message Morgan received was not important: it was something small she had done that irked Ruth by reminding her of a habit of her ex-boyfriend, and in no unequivocal terms, Ruth told her that she was deciding not to risk a repeat of that relationship.
It slightly offended Morgan to be broken up with through text, but this otherwise sat even with her. She had no use for corpses, and a corpse was what Ruth became to her, then, as all became dead when outside of her perception. She would simply become another dot, or perhaps not even that, to Morgan, of a past whose only permanence she did not yet recognize.
Certainly, it had been her objective since she was twenty years old to cure Revenants, and one she had made good progress on, but there was much that made up Morgan's mental firmament. Having been born in 1987, she had witnessed, if not directly, the nuclear bombing of Los Angeles by a host in the 90s, the establishment of legal immunity for Urasaria students, terrorist attacks in the early 00's and the expansion of the surveillance state that she now evaded. Yet these large events were not unique to her, by virtue of their size in history, and she was disconnected enough from the world that it felt as if history had ended at the landing in that Applacachian forest.
But she had found over time that isolation allowed her to cultivate herself in to the woman she wanted to be, and ignore the biological tendency of humans to agree or compromise with others. She knew from Einstein, Melville and van Gogh that being a minority was not in-itself damning. She remained in the same area for some years, and as best as she could ascertain, no Urasaria student had ever been warned of her: she would often run in to them and pose as a genre writer who wanted to 'gain some insight' in to the world of Revenant-related crime. Most were bored enough to prattle their lives to strangers, and this often allowed Morgan to solve their investigations for them, thus adding another subject to experiment on.
This was usually the most conversation she had, as most of her co-workers barely spoke English, and she rarely used technology. It was not until late 2017 that she was laid up on her couch that she decided to watch some cable television her landlord had recently put in.
Morgan was never well-informed culturally, either, but she remembered that she would often watch the American cable channel MTV when she was younger, and nostalgia often overrides any considerations of quality. At the time Morgan had last watched it, MTV had often played music videos from such boy bands as NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, though they would run a selection of hip-hop as well: these usually fit the zeitgeist of the late 90s of rebelliousness & edginess, that coincided well with professional wrestling's "Attitude Era". Still, Morgan had always preferred female musicians like Britney Spears, partially because a beautiful pop diva does well for affirming a teenage lesbian's sexuality.
As she came to MTV on the channel listing, she recognized none of the current programming -- nor was any of it music-related. Her first thought was that they had put it on to another channel, but after looking this up on her phone, she found out that MTV had practically stopped airing music videos entirely: it was now filled with trashy reality television, the names of which are not even worth embalming here. Even had they still been playing music videos, Morgan realized that there would not have been a single musician she could recognize from her childhood. It was gone, and the only thing that was permanence was impermanence.
A deep sense of isolation pervaded her, and she couldn't imagine attempting to explain what had triggered this to another person. She thought of a few teenagers that she worked alongside, and how, even if asked, they likely wouldn't be able to recall a time when it *had* aired music videos. Their world contained none of the television shows Morgan had watched when sickness kept her from school, like "Full House" or "Married With Children": or rather, it might, but eventually this generation would be sublated by one whose world contained nothing of these shards of Morgan's past. There was only one constant in this world, to Morgan, and that was her own existence, precisely by virtue that while she was death was not.
Yet here at thirty years of age, she sat in a 2017 that would soon be as gone as the dead and the living.